


Worth

by angel_deux



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, VERY MISLEADING PREMISE honestly, both chataya and sex worker rights in this story, but i mean like it's a fic lads so don't expect a deep dive into anything except the feelings, it promises sex but from early reader reviews i would say it causes mostly tears?, queen brienne au, sex worker au but with like one tenth of the smut that implies, think 'pretty woman' not...idk something sexier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-08
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:41:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 30,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26815267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angel_deux/pseuds/angel_deux
Summary: Brienne, queen of the Stormlands, is nearing thirty, and still a virgin. That doesn't bother her as much as it bothers her that she's never been kissed. Never been touched. Never experienced real romance. When her Hand suggests that she could hire an escort, Brienne decides to give it a shot. Sure, she won't fall in love with him. But it might be nice to pretend.
Relationships: Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth
Comments: 430
Kudos: 628





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> pretty off-brand and hilarious, imo, for a person who doesn't write smut to tackle a sex worker AU, but i was prompted, and liked the idea, so here we are. This really is basically a romcom about insecurities, so adjust your expectations accordingly lmao.
> 
> Thank you to my buddies who read and encouraged me in this nonsense when I approached you with "is this even remotely okay as a premise, or do i need to set it on fire?"

Brienne is never drinking with Margaery again.

The headache the next morning is brutal, first of all, but that isn’t the worst part. The worst part is that Brienne says things she doesn’t mean when she’s drunk. Or things she _does_ mean, but doesn’t want to mean, maybe. Or things she should know better than to say aloud. Emotions better carried within. Sappy, unrealistic hopes. _Desires_ , apparently, which is worst of all.

Brienne’s father died when she was nineteen years old. King of the Stormlands, he died with only Brienne to succeed him. She is a good queen, by all the metrics that are important to her. Most of her people are happy. Most of her people support her. It’s important to her, to be a queen that her father would be proud of, and she believes that she is that, and she’s happy. She _is_.

Not happy enough, apparently. Not when the alcohol makes her honest.

Margaery is a good friend to have, and she’s a good Hand. Her ties to the Baratheons through her brother and to the Reach through her grandmother would make her a good ally even if she wasn’t also brilliant, and clever, and sly, and a bunch of other things that Brienne has never felt herself to be. Brienne took her father’s throne at twenty. She was untested. Afraid. Mourning. _Alone._ For years she ruled, keeping herself apart. Locked away. She hadn’t realized the importance of a public persona _and_ a private one. Not until she met Margaery, and Margaery drew her out of the shell Brienne didn’t even realize had grown up around her.

Brienne grew up as a princess, and she entered into adulthood as a queen, and she had no blueprints for either of those things. Her mother was long dead, and her father was a kind but not very affectionate man who left most of her raising and education to a series of nannies and tutors. Friends, true friends, were an impossibility when you were both a princess _and_ entirely too recognizable to exist incognito. She was like a creature in a zoo. Gawked at. Gasped over. But no one could get close to her, and maybe there was value in the fact that she was able to fool herself into thinking she didn’t _want_ them to.

She’s nearing thirty now, and she’s a good queen. Her kingdom is prosperous. In some of the other kingdoms, the kings and queens are little better than figureheads, but not Brienne. She has always been involved in the policies that shape the lives of her people. She doesn’t regret her reign. Even when she’s at her loneliest, she doesn’t. The Tarths have had control of the Stormlands for generations now, and the kingdom has never been as strong as it has been for the ten years that Brienne has spent as queen. How could she regret it? She’s _proud._

She’s proud. She’s happy. She’s content with the friendships she _does_ have, and the space she has learned to take up as a woman in addition to the space she’s afforded as a queen. So it’s not a big deal, really. The things she doesn’t have. Not until she’s drunk and has let her guard down enough to talk about it, apparently.

It’s just that she’s never…well. Never had _sex_ , which is what Margaery was so hung up on last night, but Brienne’s thoughts on her virginity are complicated, in that she’s usually not bothered by it at all, unless she thinks about it for too long. The thing that had Brienne babbling drunkenly too long into the night was more difficult to describe, which is maybe why she did such a poor job of it. Losing one’s virginity, that’s simple enough. A single action. It’s there and then it’s not. It makes sense that Margaery would choose to focus on it; she has always been a problem solver. Brienne’s wants have less straightforward solutions. It’s not the lack of sex that makes her stomach squirm with humiliation. It’s the lack of all the rest of it. The holding of hands and the exchanging of kisses and the gentleness of caring for someone in that specific way. Not even _love_ , really. Brienne is grateful for her friends. Margery is dear to her, and Margaery’s family. The Starks, rulers of the north, have become important to her. Her assistant, Podrick, and the people who live on her island and work in her castle and have increasingly learned to treat her like _just Brienne_. But it’s different, the form of love she has never had. The physical affection of a lover.

Brienne has never been very good at expressing her wants. She’s used to bottling them up inside and never discussing them, because she learned young the way a princess was supposed to act, and a queen has even more pressure to be inscrutable. Untouchable. Going to therapy was a good choice, and she can see in hindsight that it was something she needed, but drawing out those emotions was _agonizing_ until she got the hang of it. She can only vaguely remember the things that she said last night to Margaery, but she isn’t surprised that Margaery failed to understand the most important bits, and instead focused on the sex. 

Not surprised, but still. A bit…annoyed. A bit “not listened to”.

“Some warning would have been nice,” she says, trying not to blush. She slams the folder closed and shoves it back across the table. “Shred it. Better yet: burn it.”

Margaery laughs; Brienne’s Hand has a sweet, guileless laugh, but Brienne knows better than most what mischievousness hides behind it. Margaery has never met an innuendo she couldn’t improve upon, and she delights in making her queen blush redder than Princess Stark’s hair. 

“I wasn’t sure what sort of man you’d be interested in.” Margaery is trying to look innocent, with wide eyes and a soft smile. It isn’t working. “So I tried to include a little of everything. I know you had that little crush on what’s-his-name.”

“Your brother-in-law.”

“Him,” Margaery says, dismissive, as if Brienne’s ill-fated connection with Renly Baratheon hadn’t been humiliating, and probably part of _why_ Brienne has always been so wary to date.

She doesn’t blame Renly for thinking they were on the same page. He as good as _told_ her that he was gay and only interested in marrying to bring the Stormlands back under Baratheon rule. But she’d been besotted enough to miss the truth behind his hints and sincere looks, and she had agreed to the public relationship. She was _young._ That’s her only excuse now that she looks back and can see it all so plainly.

It was disastrous for her when he was photographed kissing Loras Tyrell outside a bar in King’s Landing. It was in all the tabloids. Gleeful proclamations of _We Knew It!_ in every headline. It wasn’t an easy time for Renly, and Brienne knows now how difficult it was for he and Loras, but her heartbreak made her selfish at the time. She felt wronged and then foolish and then grieved. It was only later that she could accept that Renly never lied to her, and never promised her anything. That was the worst part. Her own heart, her own eagerness and her own wants, had betrayed her.

She was photographed for weeks afterward looking bewildered and hurt, everywhere she went. Most people seemed to feel sorry for her, for not realizing that her relationship with Renly had been a political one when it was one of the most open secrets in Westeros. But even the kindest of them were pitying, and that hurt worse than the jeering anonymous comments that delighted in the whole affair.

“That was a long time ago,” she says. It was before she met Margaery, before she forgave herself and both Renly and Loras for the scandal. Before she learned to hide herself better so it would not happen again.

“Exactly. It was a long time ago, and I haven’t seen you so much as look at a man since. You said last night that you’re _only_ interested in men. It’s a pity, because I know so many more delightful women who’d be happy to do the job, but you’ll find I respected your wishes. You also said that you were nervous that you wouldn’t even know what to _do_ when the time came, so I’ve…”

“I didn’t say that,” Brienne interrupts, mortification growing. Margaery only grins, and Brienne drops her head into her hands. “Oh, gods.”

“It was an illuminating conversation.”

“You did it on purpose. I’d swear it.”

“Your Hand, purposely get you drunk so that you’d finally admit what’s been bothering you? You have quite the imagination, your grace.”

Brienne wrinkles her nose, the way she always does when Margaery uses her title, and Margaery laughs. Despite her false deference, she ignores Brienne’s order to burn the folder, and instead she pushes it back across the table with two fingers. Her grin grows more pointed, more smug. She knows Brienne isn’t going to order it burned a second time.

Brienne sighs and pulls the folder the rest of the way across the table. _I’m almost thirty_ , she reminds herself. _I can look at a few pictures of topless men without causing a scene_. She steels herself and opens the folder again, prepared this time for what she’s going to find.

It isn’t _just_ the toplessness. It’s the implications of further nudity that lie beyond the edges of the frame. Margaery has apparently scoured the internet for the most brazen photographs of male escorts she could find, and she has printed out dossiers of each one. She’s brilliant, Margaery, which is why Brienne took her on as Hand. But it’s the _worst_ when she decides to use her work ethic for things like this.

“ _Why_ did you think this was the way to go about it?” she asks.

“I thought it was funny.”

“You were wrong.”

“I was right. I’m hilarious. But I’m also a genius. Loras and I…”

“You asked _Loras_?”

“Who else could I trust? I would have asked grandmother, but...”

“Oh, gods. _Margaery_.”

“Bit out of date, that one. Unless you like older men.”

“I can’t tell if this is an elaborate prank. It’s so hard to tell with you.”

“I know. It’s the image I cultivate.” A weary, amused sigh, and she taps her finger on the folder to draw Brienne’s attention back to it. “Not a prank, though. Sorry to spoil the mystery, but I’m deadly serious. These men are the best in the business, and they’re discreet, which is the most important part. You’re only here for a few months before you’re back on Tarth, with no options for _entertainment_ , while I’m here doing all the boring meetings and summits and all the rest of the Hand nonsense in your stead.”

“You _wanted_ to be my Hand,” Brienne snaps. “No Tarth ruler has had a Hand for…”

“Six generations, yes, I know. You’ve said. And I’m not complaining!”

“That’s exactly what you’re doing.”

“No, I’m trying to say that I want you to be _happy_.”

“I am—”

“You’re _content_ , Brienne. Resigned. That’s not the same thing as happy.”

Brienne hates it, the soft way Margaery looks at her. Her emotions are such tangled, knotted things, and she hardly understands them herself. When Margaery looks at her like that, Brienne knows that she _should_ be better able to figure it out. Explain it. She can blame Margaery for misunderstanding and the alcohol for muddling all she wants, but she knows she wouldn’t be able to do the job any better if she tried again, now that she’s sober. It has never been easy for her, explaining her feelings. Margaery is a good friend, but in terms of Brienne’s entire life, she’s a new one. Brienne is still learning to trust. It isn’t easy for her.

“I’m content,” she says, and she does her best to make the word seem brighter than it had when Margaery spoke it. “And that’s enough.”

She doesn’t _really_ expect that to be the end of it; Margaery is almost as stubborn as she is. But it _feels_ like it should work. Margaery looks like she understands, even.

Still: “it’s not enough for me,” she says. Sincere and shitty at once. “And as your Hand, and as your _friend_ , I would feel so much better about sending you away again if I knew you were going away completely satisfied. Absolutely taken care of. Given the best attention money can buy.”

“I’m queen of the Stormlands, Margaery.”

“Yes, you are. You’re a queen who’s on a several months long visit to King’s Landing for a _very_ important summit on the upcoming winter, and a _very_ important autumn festival, and a _very_ important football tournament, and…well. Huh. Actually, that’s not very much, is it? Whatever will you do to fill your days? Press interviews? No, you don’t like those. Staff meetings? You know we can handle them without you, and you intimidate the interns anyway. Gosh, now that I’m thinking about it...it seems like this is the perfect opportunity.”

“To hire an escort,” Brienne deadpans.

“A very _good_ one,” Margaery replies sweetly.

* * *

The worst thing about Margaery's suggestion is that it’s not a terrible one. There are points against it. _A lot_ of points against it. But it begins to wriggle around in Brienne’s brain almost as soon as the conversation is done. Because it’s not like Brienne is morally opposed to the idea. She's acquaintances, perhaps even friends, with King’s Landing’s most well respected and well connected madam. She met Chataya almost five years ago, when she was helping sponsor a bill to reform sex work laws in King’s Landing. It was an opening attempt to work on reforming laws in the whole of the Seven Kingdoms, and it was a big swing, fairly early in Brienne’s reign, to take on something that remained so controversial. They worked together for months, and they ended up getting the reforms they wanted. Safer sex work was a noble goal, and Brienne had been happy to take it on, for all it had cost her some support from more conservative lords in her kingdom. It was an education, too. She’d done plenty of unlearning about her misconceptions, and she walked away with a very bright view of the woman and the way she operated. Chataya is still in business, and if _she_ is involved in the selection of a man who can be counted on for discretion…perhaps Brienne would be able to trust that.

When she was younger, she imagined that she would only have sex when it was _right_. With a man she loved. A man she trusted, and had spent months if not years learning. But she’s not a girl anymore, and now there is something appealing about the idea of almost-anonymity. Set up an appointment with a man, learn what she needs to learn, and then never see him again. They both get what they want out of the bargain, and no one ever has to find out. It almost seems _too_ good.

Because there’s always the risk. And that’s the one argument against it that makes Brienne hesitate: exposure.

The Evenstar isn’t quite as lofty a title as it used to be. The Seven Kingdoms operate more like one, most of the time, but she’s still _royalty,_ and she still believes in the importance of her seat. And the people still believe in the importance of a royal scandal every few months to keep things interesting. Sure, Brienne deciding to hire a male escort wouldn’t be anything like Robert Baratheon’s string of infidelities and his dramatic hunting accident death. It wouldn’t even be on par with his famous divorce from his wife Lyanna, and all the various grievances that were aired publically between them. It would probably _pale_ in comparison to Lyanna’s secret son, born when she was only fifteen and hidden among her brother’s children for years.

There isn’t a kingdom in Westeros that hasn’t been hit with a scandal or two in the past thirty odd years. Olenna Tyrell, Queen of the Reach, has been the subject of a few rather salacious ones, and there are rumors she caused the fall of several of the great old houses, clearing the way for her children to amass more power. Jon Arryn was nearly murdered by his wife and her lover—a fact that only came out years after it happened. Even the _Starks_ haven’t been able to escape a few little dings, what with King Eddard marrying Catelyn Tully—the woman who had been engaged to marry his dead elder brother—and then hiding Lyanna’s secret son for years.

So it wouldn’t be the worst thing, if Brienne hired an escort and then it was discovered. Her reign would survive the scandal. Her kingdom has not weathered much in the way of public spectacle, but her people are an understanding sort, and the most public shaming Brienne has been through was of the kind that roused their pity, not their hatred. Surely they could forgive her _one_ little slip.

Her father did not stumble much when he was king, either. He was considered a good and honorable man, and Brienne is proud that his legacy has not been tainted by any scandals coming to light after his death. He had a string of mistresses when she was growing up, and there were some unpleasant rumors that he may have gotten into the habit before Brienne’s mother’s death. Some of those mistresses wound up in the temporary spotlight with possible bastards, though all of those children were eventually proven not to be his. And aside from Renly and Stannis Baratheon, the lords of the Stormlands are an aging, staid lot. A few of them have had minor run-ins with the Goldcloaks or issues with money that make the papers, but nothing as shameful as Petyr Baelish and Lysa Arryn conspiring to kill her husband, or Elia Martell taking her children and fleeing to Dorne after her husband’s betrayal.

And she certainly wouldn’t be the first member of a royal family to hire an escort. She’s not _totally_ naïve, despite what Margaery believes. Chataya caters to only the most exclusive and wealthy clients, and no one is more exclusive and wealthy than the old families. Brienne is sure she’d recognize quite a few names if she could get a look at Chataya’s client list. Many of the people she’s visiting with and negotiating with in these next few months in this King’s Landing, even. So it’s not about being unique, or thinking that it’s not possible for someone in her position. It’s just…

How _humiliating_ would it be?

People already say unkind things about Brienne’s height and her face and her body. She is unqueenly, unladylike, unappealing. She’s done her best, the past few years, to avoid reading most of the horrible things people say online, but sometimes things slip through, and she was once a teenage princess, a public figure, who hadn’t yet learned that nothing good came of searching her own name online. It was like a compulsion she had. This need to hurt herself by searching out the worst things that people were saying about her. Crying herself to sleep about it. People had been cruel, hidden behind anonymous names and blank profile pictures. That was how she grew up, and it was a brutal thing for a child to endure. It made her strong, in the end, she believes, but that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t wish she had been able to avoid it, and that doesn’t mean it doesn’t sometimes seep in and make her feel like that teenager again. If it ever came out that she’d hired an _escort_ …

So she debates. She wonders. She picks apart the premise and goes back and forth on what she wants and what she thinks she should do. _They already say horrible shit, and I already don’t read it. So what if they say more? What does it matter? If someone comes out and talks, Margaery will shut them up. It’ll blow over. My reputation will survive. I’ll still have good policies, and I’ll still be a beloved queen. This isn’t the fucking dark ages._

They’ll say she was so desperate for a fuck that she had to pay for it. They’ll say that _they_ couldn’t be paid to fuck her. They, anonymous they, they were the ones who pilloried her when she was naïve about Renly. They were cruel when she took the crown, moaning about the state of the kingdom because a woman was to rule them. They mocked her for remaining unmarried at twenty-five, and they will mock her for remaining unmarried at thirty. They photoshop even more unflattering versions of the paparazzi photos of her jogging or working out. They probably _already_ think she’s fucking escorts thanks to her friendship with Chataya. Why should she factor _their_ opinions into anything she does? They’re nothing.

“I want to talk to Chataya,” she tells Margaery.

* * *

Chataya is delighted. Possibly more delighted than Margaery. It’s hard to say. Both of them are grinning at Brienne across the table in Brienne’s hotel suite. The meeting is fully aboveboard, as far as anyone has to know. Margaery thought a _hiding in plain sight_ strategy would be best, and it’s rare for Brienne to visit King’s Landing without seeing Chataya at least once, so Brienne agreed. It makes her feel twitchy, and trapped, but this whole thing makes her feel twitchy and trapped, and so she doesn’t put a stop to it, even though maybe she should.

“I’m happy that you’re taking control of your life,” Chataya says. She’s a woman so beautiful that it aches, and she’s endlessly full of the confidence that Brienne has never possessed, and being near her always has the effect of making Brienne feel exactly the opposite. But Chataya is so kind and so genuinely worshipful of the human body in all its forms that it’s impossible to feel anything but comfortable around her. Brienne has learned to feel at home in her own skin, but she never feels as good about it as she does after she has spent an afternoon talking with Chataya. “You deserve to be touched, Brienne,” she says now. “And you deserve to be cared for.”

It’s funny, Brienne thinks. She hasn’t even expressed what she really wants, yet. Hasn’t had to find a way to explain that it isn’t just about sex for her. And yet Chataya seems to know. Does it show on her face, maybe? Is there some particular color to her blush or set to her shoulders that tells Chataya that more than the sex, Brienne is looking for…well. Something else. She supposes she doesn’t even really know what she’s looking for. It’s a feeling. Something she doesn’t know how to describe. Safety, but it’s more than that. Comfort, but it’s more than that, too. Whatever it is, it’s something that a man she’s paying won’t be able to give her, surely, but maybe he can come close.

“I need someone who can be counted on for discretion,” she says. Her shoulders are squared, and she’s sitting up straight as she looks across the table at Chataya. _Ready for battle_ , Margaery often says when she sees Brienne like this. Chataya’s answering smile is soft.

“So serious, Brienne. Like you’re negotiating with a fellow queen. But you’re not. I’m here on business, yes, but I’m here as a friend, too. Remember that. Now, tell me what sort of man you’re looking for, and I will find him. Margaery has compiled a wonderful list to start, but I know many more, in many other kingdoms. If you’re not comfortable with someone from King’s Landing, I am good friends with a woman in Dorne who runs a _very_ respectable brothel. If you want someone from further afield, I have many contacts in the Summer Isles. Pentos. Myr. Name it, and it will be yours.”

“I,” Brienne says. She has no idea where to start. What _is_ she looking for? How can she put it into words? She looks helplessly at Margaery, who stands up.

“Why don’t I go get us some coffee,” she says, pleasantly, without even a hint of slyness. The idea is proclaimed a good one, and Margaery goes, squeezing Brienne’s shoulder to comfort her on her way out. Brienne is cheered slightly by it. Margaery likes to tease, and she likes to prod at Brienne’s weaker spots sometimes, but when it comes to the important stuff, she always understands what Brienne needs. Well, not so much on the sex thing, maybe, but she knows Brienne would be too self-conscious for total honesty if Margaery remained in the room.

When she’s gone, closing the door quietly behind her, leaving Brienne and Chataya alone in the suite, Brienne can breathe more easily. She loves Margaery, and she trusts Margaery, and she knows that Margaery supports her in this, and she knows that Margaery would not judge her for what she wants. But there’s something different about speaking only to Chataya. Chataya _understands_ in a way that Margaery can’t, and she won’t ever judge Brienne. She’s heard and seen everything by now, by her own admission. Nothing surprises her. Brienne doesn’t think she’s asking for anything particularly outlandish, or shocking, but it’s just…still not easy for her. Asking for anything at all and trusting that she won’t be laughed at for it. Fears of being humiliated aren’t always rational. It’s just so easy to be that girl again, loving Renly and having the truth of it dashed in her face by every paper and every man with a microphone and a camera lurking on every street corner. She weathered that storm, but it made her harder. More stoic. At least outwardly. And even inwardly, she has not let herself fall like that again. There’s no better way to avoid a repeat than by shoving _all_ of it down, where even she can’t see it.

This isn’t going to be the same as Renly. She knows that. Even _she_ isn’t going to be so oblivious as to fall in love with a man she hires to have sex with her. But she’s still afraid of what she might feel, or of what she might be perceived to feel. The things she wants are tenderness. Closeness. Conversation. Such pathetic things to reach for, because it means it isn’t given to you. What does that say about her? What will it say about her to people if this all comes out? Chataya could tell the press everything, and they would laugh at her again. At the big, ugly queen, the old unmarried queen, saying she wants to hold someone’s hand. _Remember Renly?_ they would sneer. She has tried so hard to avoid being laughed at, and now she’s doing _this_. Inviting the risk.

“Tell me,” Chataya says, and Brienne tries.

“I want someone who’s not going to be…in awe of me. Or my position. I don’t want someone who’s afraid to make a joke, or a comment. I want someone who will have real conversations with me.”

“Easy enough,” Chataya says, and Brienne can see her thinking about it, can almost imagine her mentally crossing off a few of the names on her list. It gives Brienne courage, to be reminded that Chataya is not only her friend. She’s also _very_ good at her job.

“But I also wouldn’t like a man who...who would want to control me, or dominate me. It seems I’m always reading…” She stops, embarrassed, but Chataya nods, and it prods Brienne into finishing. “Whenever I read…things.” Chataya smiles, but it isn’t mocking. It’s _fond_ , and Brienne keeps going, because she trusts, and because she knows she _can_ trust. “Maybe I’m just not built the right way. But it seems there’s always…that women want to be…or that women are _supposed_ to. Especially strong women.”

“There can be freedom in it, yes,” Chataya says. “But Brienne, it isn’t for everyone. We have preferences in sex just as we have preferences in what films to watch or which style of food we like best. There is nothing wrong with a strong person who continues to keep the reins behind closed doors, just as there is nothing with a strong person who delights in handing them off to someone else. It doesn’t say nearly as much about you as you might think. Your preferences, your choices, it’s all valid to me. You are a wonderful woman who has worked hard to get where you are. You may never feel comfortable ceding control, and that is perfectly fine.” She grins a bit again. “Porn, even the most delicately written, often hits the same tropes. You not following the path of one doesn’t mean anything. I have always been the same. I never liked giving men an inch of control in sex, and I spent years enjoying it.”

When Brienne first met Chataya five years ago, and she knew nothing about the industry, nothing about what Chataya was trying to do with her push for reforms, it was a lot like this. Chataya explaining things in a pleasant voice while Brienne blushed and was mildly scandalized but refused to show it. She’s blushing now, squirming a bit, but only because they’re talking about _her._ It’s still so comforting to hear Chataya talk with such authority about the work she spent most of her life doing. Brienne has spent years wondering if there was something wrong with her for not wanting to be dominated by a man. Reading fiction about women who only felt complete after ceding control. Letting a man lead them. Strong women, women who were otherwise everything Brienne aspired to be. _Am I wrong for feeling like it would make me uncomfortable?_ she would wonder. She should have known Chataya’s answer would be _no._

“I just…I deal with that so much, I think. With these politicians who still don’t think a woman is fit to rule alone. Being in King’s Landing has lowered my tolerance for it. I don’t want to deal with it in the bedroom as well.”

“A fair ask,” Chataya laughs happily, and she tilts her head to the side, smiling at Brienne, spotting some remaining hesitation in her. “You think you’re asking for so much. You’re not. Be as specific as you want. This is about _you_.”

Brienne _tries_. She’s nervous, and the shape of her fantasy is formless at best, and she finds now that she can’t think of _any_ specific descriptors. What does she want? A vague male presence, kind and soft and amusing. Gentle but not overly precious with her. Respectful. Isn’t that enough?

“A good heart?” she tries. Chataya laughs again.

“Easier to find than you might think. Come, narrow it down.”

“Pretty,” Brienne finally says. She feels ridiculous saying it. She nearly has to spit the word to get it out. “I like pretty men.” Everyone knows she likes pretty men after the Renly fiasco. Chataya is too kind to say it. “Not exclusively, but I...”

“Ah-ah! None of that! Your dream man. Describe him to me.”

“Kind,” Brienne says, immediately, which is perhaps telling. “Honorable.” Which is even more so. “It doesn’t matter if he’s pretty.”

“It does today. I am not going to think less of you for telling me what you want. You know this about me, I think, but I know it’s more difficult for some people to speak their wants aloud, and I understand. But this is for _you_ , and I still have so many men in mind for you. I need your help in narrowing it down. And you should know, love: I’m not laughing at you because you’re inexperienced. I’m laughing because you’re sweet, and because I’m so pleased to be the one that you’ve trusted. Okay?” Brienne nods. “Now. What else?”

“He’d be…gentle,” Brienne says. That’s embarrassing too. There was a part of her that earnestly thought she would be able to do this without blushing, or squirming, or being uncomfortable. She’s not sure where that confidence has gone, but it isn’t here this morning, despite Chataya’s best efforts. She feels exposed. “I’m sorry, maybe this was a mistake.”

“It wasn’t,” Chataya says gently. “Go on, Brienne. I’m here to assist you. You helped me when I needed you. There is nothing shameful in accepting help from others.”

Which, of course, is the exact right thing to say, and it makes Brienne calm again. It’s just another form of help. Brienne has never allowed anyone to feel shame when she helps them. She helps them gladly; she gives them what they need. When she was working with Chataya the first time, she knew almost nothing about the industry, and in their long conversations about it, Chataya always painted her work in such beautiful colors. Described it like that, like _help._ A form of aid. A service that would give people something that they were having trouble finding for themselves. Brienne thought it was lovely. Beautiful, even. As someone who had always been a bit lonely, it spoke to her, the idea that people existed who would be happy to take away that loneliness if she wanted them to.

She wants them to now. It’s a surprising realization. She’s not just doing this to humor Margaery, or because she feels like she _should_ do it. She’s tired of waiting. Tired of feeling alone, and unlovable, and unfuckable by the standards of the men she wants to fuck. She’s tired of telling herself that those things don’t matter, and even _believing_ that those things don’t matter, and then being struck by anxiety and emptiness when they suddenly begin to matter to _her_. It’s not about what the rest of the world thinks. It’s not about what she _should_ do or _should_ feel. She doesn’t think she needs this experience because she’s nearly thirty and because society says she should have done it long ago. She _wants_ to experience it because _she_ is ready. She just has to get out of her own way, first.

“I don’t think I would even…I don’t know if I want him to…to fuck me,” she says. It’s something she’s realizing as she says it. “Not if he didn’t want to. Margaery may have made it seem…but it isn’t about losing my virginity. I don’t care about that.”

“All right. But would you be open to it? If he wanted to?”

Brienne nods. It’s not that she thinks it’s impossible. When she was younger, she carried it close to her heart. _Unfuckable._ There were men, often online, often anonymous, who said they wanted to fuck her, but it was never good. _Her body is decent enough,_ they’d say. _Just put a paper bag over her head._ Other horrible things. Being the daughter of a king, she was constantly under a microscope, and the people who loved to cause a stir online, loved to say cruel things just because they could, they said those things about her because there was the added titillation of her being a _princess._ She was held in some reverence. Not for AerysFan69, or whatever. _They_ were too edgy to care about respecting her.

It was such a small, petty thing. But it left its mark, which she hates. Better if she could ignore those things completely. Forget them. Forget searching her own name and then crying at what she saw. There were kind people. People who liked her, and looked up to her, but they were not the loudest voices, and they are not the ones she remembers now. Now, she remembers those horrid comments, and she wonders if she would even be able to go through with it, if this escort she’s hiring _does_ claim to want to fuck her.

She doesn’t think she’s _unfuckable_ now. She doesn’t carry that word as closely. An echo of it, maybe, that tattooed itself inside her when she was young and has dogged her ever since, no matter how much she wishes she could escape it. But there is still some formless fear. This idea that she might look into his eyes and see that word reflected back at her. She doesn’t know if she could take that.

“I wouldn’t be opposed,” she decides. “But it wouldn’t be…necessary.”

Chataya nods, and she looks at Brienne in a scrutinizing kind of way that somehow doesn’t make Brienne feel like she’s under a microscope still. Brienne looks helplessly back at her. 

“You are a queen,” Chataya reminds her. Her voice is soft, but firm. Rigid beneath the velvety tone she uses when she speaks to her clients. She was an endless source of comfort and inspiration and information when they were working together. Brienne doesn’t think there’s anyone else in the world she would trust with something like this, and still it is so difficult.

“I am a queen,” Brienne agrees. “And if the world found out…”

“They won’t.”

“If the men talked…”

“They would not. These are good men, every one, and even if they were not, they wouldn’t dare.”

Brienne would not find the velvet comforting. Too many people hide things behind those kinds of silky promises. But the steel, she trusts. She nods.

“All right,” she says, and she describes him. This man she wants but does not know. She’s half-convinced he can’t exist. But Chataya smiles wider as Brienne speaks, and she is beaming by the end.

“I know just the one,” she says.


	2. Chapter 2

Brienne cannot believe he’s real.

The man who arrives at her door at the allotted time is nothing like the men from the pictures in the folder that Margaery and Loras put together. Those had been professional shoots from escort agencies that advertised in all the same ways, trying to entice people to visit their websites or book an appointment. Chataya doesn’t use those methods. She doesn’t need to; exclusivity is part of the draw.

The men in the pictures had been posed, oiled, their photos retouched to remove any blemishes. In theory, Brienne doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with that. But they made her uncomfortable to look at them. Flexed and confident and staring hungrily into the camera. She knew she couldn’t judge them from their photographs alone, but they caused an instinctive reaction in her. They were the kind of men she saw at the gym all the time when she was younger and still thought going to a public gym was something she needed to do. They were the men who would doubt her strength and jeer about her and then be shamed into silently hating her when she lifted more and ran faster and fought harder than any of them. She could not judge those men in the photos, but she could fear them, and she did. She saw men who would delight in fucking a queen for the fact that she was a queen and she was powerful and she was momentarily under their spell. Those men who would seek to _claim_ her power for themselves. Wrest it jealously away. They weren’t fair judgements, but they were hers. The man at the door being nothing like them is a point in his favor.

Brienne always thought that she would only sleep with men who respected her, but she supposes she isn’t so picky anymore. A man who can pretend to respect her seems good enough now. A man who will accept her money and accept her body the way it is and won’t try to take the control she has so carefully gathered over the years. She has had to work so hard to love herself, after that humiliating press explosion with Renly and after the years of feeling lonely and empty until Margaery saw her as a woman more than a monarch and made a friend of her. She isn’t willing to risk that. Not for something as simple as sex.

Porn has definitely given her a skewed idea of how these things work. She knows that. Filmed or written, she has no idea what basis any of it has in reality. She’s unsure what she wants, unsure what she _would_ want if she ever had a chance to ask, because she has little idea what the options are. Ordering an escort to her hotel suite seemed, and still _does_ seem, an absurd thing to do. Like room service. Is she supposed to ask him for his daily specials? She’d imagined he would look something like the men in the pictures and that she would have no idea what to do with him. Probably pay him for the inconvenience, her face flaming red, and send him on his way.

But the man Chataya sends to her…

He’s older than her, which is a surprise. She can’t say how much, but there are signs of his age on him. He wears it well. Crinkles at the corners of his eyes. A few flecks of gray in his golden hair and in his slightly darker beard. She’d expected someone younger, because being nearly thirty herself…well. Maybe she isn’t as immune to stereotyping as she would wish. She expected someone in his early twenties. Too young for her comfort, maybe, and then she’d have had reason to send him away. Maybe that’s what she wanted, really. An excuse.

The man Chataya sent is fit, and muscular, but not in a way that makes Brienne feel like it’s cultivated exclusively for looks. He has a lean sort of grace to him. He wears his clothing about as well as he wears his age: tight jeans, a well-fit t-shirt under a flannel shirt. He has blonde hair. More golden than hers, and his is curly, and longer than hers as well. Like a romance cover model, but prettier. Less carved from stone. He has a trim beard, too, and that combined with the flannel makes her think absurdly of a warm, fire-lit cabin in the middle of winter.

“Shit,” she says. Aloud, which she didn’t really mean to do. At least it’s honest.

“First time I’ve had that reaction, I’ll admit,” the man says with apparent amusement, scratching at his beard with one hand, looking her up and down. “I’d ask you if this is the wrong room, but… Chataya told me I’d know you when I saw you. She also warned me not to call you _your grace_ , so something tells me I’m where I’m supposed to be.” He bows a little, grinning. “Your grace.”

Brienne frowns and steps aside to let him in. He’s dressed casually, but neatly, and if anyone happened to see him, he would look like another reporter arriving to her suite for an interview. She’s done several today alone. Margaery’s idea, like most of the rest of this mess.

“And yet, _your grace_ is one of the first things you say,” she points out.

“Your first word was ‘shit’, so I suppose I’m feeling a little defensive.” Contrary to his words, he smiles at her. She can’t decide how serious he is. He has an open, laughing face. Green eyes that flash with intelligence and intrigue and something else she can’t quite figure out.

_He has a good heart_ , Chataya promised her, and it’s only Brienne’s trust in her friend that keeps her from turning this man away. He’s too much, she thinks. Too bright. Too intense. Too _real_. Like she expected a hypothetical person, not a real one, and suddenly she’s surprised he exists.

“I’m sorry, that was impolite,” she says. “Would you like a drink?”

He looks at her in a way that she can only describe as _arch_. He moves past her into the seating area, and he spies the champagne already poured, waiting on the table.

“Well,” he says. “Isn’t this fancy.”

“I’m _nervous_ ,” she blurts angrily, and he turns to look at her with surprise. Maybe he wasn’t being a prick. Maybe that’s just how he talks. She can feel color rising to her cheeks. She can’t do this. “I think this was a mistake.”

“Chataya said you’d say that. I didn’t think it would be so quick.”

“Well, Chataya knows me, and she knows I’m nervous.” She’s grinding out her words in the way she does when she’s trying to hold on to her manners even though it’s difficult.

“She told me to tell you that I’m a nice man who won’t make you feel ashamed. Which is true, by the way. I don’t think I made that very clear, from your reaction.” He laughs a bit. “ _Shit._ ”

“You startled me.”

“Yes, apparently.”

She glares at him. He looks back with an amused expression, but she can see a little bit of that defensiveness he mentioned. He’s wondering why she reacted the way she did. She thinks about the first few things she noticed about him: older. Not fit in the way she was expecting. Not like the ads Margaery put together. Maybe he was _expecting_ her disappointment. Anticipating it, the same way she does when she meets someone new. She wants to laugh, but doesn’t.

“I have a tendency,” she starts. Stops. “To misread things. And to react.”

“Something we share, I think.”

“I just. I wasn’t expecting you. I expected Chataya would ignore my requests.”

“And what requests were those?”

“Did she not tell you?”

“No. She just told me I was perfect.”

“Well.”

She refuses to soothe his wounded ego any more than that, but he preens a bit anyway, clearly pleased. She sits at the table, and gestures for him to do the same.

“I thought you’d be one of the kings, honestly,” he says. He sprawls in his seat more than sits. Graceful in a way that thrills her. He takes a sip of the champagne. He looks at her with a challenge she doesn’t rise to. “They’re usually the only ones who use Chataya’s services. It’s too bad.”

“I’m sorry to disappoint.”

He laughs, and he leans back in the chair, making himself comfortable, looking at her like she’s a puzzle he wants to solve.

“Gods, you weren’t kidding about misreading, were you? I meant that it’s too bad that the kings feel free to hire through Chataya while the queens are more hesitant.” At her scowl, he grins wider. “I’m glad you’ve taken the plunge.”

She’s curious, so she has to ask, though she’s sure it’s a mistake as soon as she opens her mouth.

“How many of the kings have you…worked for, then?”

“ _Worked for_ ,” he mocks, gently enough that she smiles instead of cringing from it. “I wish I could tell you, but as you’re well aware, I’m sworn to secrecy about my clients.”

“Hmm,” Brienne says. She takes a gulp of champagne, hoping that it gives her some courage. “Right answer.”

“Was that a test, then?”

“No, I just forgot.”

He laughs earnestly, and he holds out his hand. She stares at him. Takes it. Shakes it. His grin grows.

“Jaime,” he says, and then he blinks and snatches his hand back, as if she has done something or said something shocking. Squeezed his hand too hard, perhaps. Too eagerly. His confidence wavers. Hers is shaken. She resists the urge to look down at herself, like she thinks there might be a stain on her shirt that he’s just noticed.

“Brienne,” she replies, and Jaime’s smile comes back. Strained a bit at the corners.

“I know,” he reminds her.

* * *

The “negotiation”, as she chooses to think of it, is _excruciating_. Bad enough that she had to describe what she wanted to Chataya, but when she lays out the printed contract that Chataya sent over for them both to sign, Jaime insists on going over every point aloud, making sure that it’s still what Brienne wants. She isn’t sure why she doesn’t show him the door. Perhaps a mixture of stubborn pride and a shamed refusal to back down. Chataya warned him that she would talk about backing out, and she’s already tried it once. She might just be too obstinate to try it again so soon.

Still, to hear her own desires read back to her in a professional tone of voice, just this shy of teasing. Lighthearted and not-quite-mocking. It feels like she’s giving a fucking deposition, like she has done something horribly wrong and is being made to answer for it by some lawyer who isn’t even trying not to be gleeful about her downfall.

Jaime doesn’t take pity on her. He doesn’t skip anything, or tell her that they don’t have to talk about it, or try to speak to her in a more gentle tone of voice, even though he must see how irritated she is with him. She regrets telling Chataya that she didn’t want someone who was afraid of her title, even though it was true. She doesn’t want to be with someone who’s going to be all deference. She wants someone who will talk with her like she’s a person, because she _is_ a person, and because she wants to feel like one. She couldn’t stomach someone sitting there meekly and waiting for her to tell him what to do. But she’s not sure she likes _this_ much more. Jaime is just slightly sardonic in everything, but he never seems disturbed or disgusted by her requests. He seems confused when he reaches the part of the contract where she says he has no obligation to fuck her, and that’s the only time in the whole discussion that the amusement goes out of his eyes.

“You could be paying a lot less if all you wanted was a person to share a few cuddles with,” he says harshly, and she bristles at _that_ , too. She almost does it: sends him away. Tells Chataya that this whole thing was a mistake. She doesn’t _need_ this. She doesn’t need companionship, and she doesn’t need sex, and she doesn’t need physical affection. She has survived this long without it, and she’s going to be _fine._ Content, just like she told Margaery. It’s good enough. She can wait until she meets someone she likes, or she can wait forever, and either way, she will not suffer much from it, she doesn’t think. But...this course of action makes _sense._ It’s the best chance she’s going to get at something so emotionless, so devoid of strings and complications. She trusts Chataya, and so she must trust him, this man that Chataya trusts. _Think of him like your therapist_ , she tries to tell herself. _It doesn’t matter what he thinks of you, or if he’s making fun of you, or if he’s smiling too much. He’s willing to do the job. That’s what matters._

“I’m a virgin,” she tells him bluntly. She wants to try and be as self-deprecating and funny as she thinks he would be in the same situation. Say something like “I suppose that’s not a surprise to you”. She doesn’t. She’s too earnest for that, she fears. “As I’m sure you can imagine, I didn’t grow up dreaming of the day I could pay someone to fuck me.”

“No,” Jaime admits, quiet and sincere. 

“I don’t fancy the idea of…” she braces herself. Feels like a fool. Perhaps part of the problem is that she has never been very good at describing her own feelings, her own wants. “Of paying someone to _be_ with me when they have no interest in it. I’ve told Chataya that I would be open to it, but it is entirely your choice, and at your discretion how far this goes. I won’t…” She struggles a bit, there, because she finds that she cannot describe what she’s so afraid of. She _is_ afraid, though. Horribly afraid, and she knows she’s drawing such arbitrary lines, and she knows that she’s overthinking this, and she hates the sparkling intelligence behind Jaime’s eyes, because she knows he’s seeing all of it. _Your therapist, Brienne,_ she reminds herself. _Think of it like that. In a few months, you’ll be going back to Tarth. You need never see him again. You need never book him beyond this appointment, if neither of you are comfortable with the arrangement. He won’t talk. Chataya promised, and you trust her, and so you must trust Jaime, too._ “I have this idea,” she says quietly. “This…I don’t know. Recurring concern.” _Waking nightmare,_ she would probably say, if she was being more honest. “I have never been beautiful. I’ve never _felt_ beautiful, either. Growing up…it was easy to see the worst things that people thought of me. Easy to believe them, too. I’m not a child anymore, but those things…”

“Linger,” Jaime finishes, still quiet, like a man who has some experience in the matter, although she would not think he did. She nods.

“Linger,” she agrees. “And I wouldn’t want to watch someone…” She looks away from him, tries to think of a way to say it without sounding like a foolish child, but she finds that it’s impossible. She just hates the idea of watching someone _pretend_ to find her desirable. Watching someone perform the part of gentle lover while _unfuckable_ screams out from behind their eyes. She can be so good at seeing past people when they try to hide their true feelings from her, and she’s terrified of what she’ll see if she goes through with it. It would feel awkward, and it would feel exploitative, and it would feel _wrong_.

His hand is on hers, suddenly, where she has spread her fingers out, flat on the table. She looks up, startled. Jaime has risen to his feet, and has walked around the table to stand above her. His hand on hers, he goes down on one knee before her, and he looks up at her. _Earnest_ , she thinks. He looks it, at least. If he’s pretending, he’s pretending well. Maybe she _wouldn’t_ be able to see it.

“It’s not going to be a problem,” he says, and there is a surprising well of understanding in his voice. In his eyes. “Brienne, look at me.” She’s not sure she can. She has dropped her eyes to their joined hands. They’re of a similar size. Jaime’s hands have callouses, just as hers do. His fingers are tanned and slender, and hers pale and stouter. She drags her eyes up, and his are boring into hers. His forehead is furrowed in concern. All that laughing amusement is gone from his expression, and yet she doesn’t fear that this is a mask he has hidden behind. The earnest, gentle lover. _No_ , she thinks. Remembers. _He has a good heart_. “You deserve everything you’ve asked for,” he says, and there is so much confidence, so much sincerity, in his voice. “And I’m going to make sure you get it.”

* * *

He leaves not long after that, signing the contract after scratching out the part about not fucking her. He scribbles over it with black pen, and he writes “not an issue” as explanation in bold lettering in the margins. Brienne stares at it afterward, running her fingers over the grooves his emphatic writing left in the paper. She lies awake in bed that night, staring at the back of her eyelids and trying not to think about it. She fails. At the door, before she had opened it to see him out, he had looked at her like he expected something. A kiss, maybe. She had been too afraid to give it to him, but she imagines it. Kissing him. Pulling him back into the room by his hand. Into the bedroom. He would be willing to be led by her. She knows that. He had the amused look and the easy confidence of a man who could lead or be led, and either way it would be no challenge to him. He would be respectful, too. He would not bristle if she had to back off from something. He would not laugh at her if she changed her mind. He would not say anything cruel.

He would not look at her like something unpleasant he was being paid to endure.

She doesn’t think so, anyway.

* * *

“Well?” Margaery asks, the next morning. Brienne slides the folder across the surface of the table. It seems like a different woman who sat here with Jaime yesterday and heard him read her pathetic wants aloud. She doesn’t think she blushes, but she feels a squirming of _something_ when she takes her hand off it. The contract, signed, for Margaery to deliver to Chataya. Margaery grins down at it. “You approved him, then.”

“He was perfect.”

Margaery makes a pleased sort of humming noise and sits down, handing Brienne the coffee she has so far been withholding, like a reward for making it this far.

“You know who he is, don’t you?”

“I know he’s an escort.”

“Was, actually. He’s retired.”

“Clearly he’s not.”

“You know the action movie cliché where the hero comes out of retirement for one last job and then dies heroically in the attempt?”

“Gods, Margaery. I’m not going to _kill_ the man.”

Margaery laughs prettily and props her chin on her hand, staring off into nothing as if there are a thousand wicked things she’s only refraining from speaking because she can’t choose which one to say.

“Well, all the same,” she says. “He’s definitely retired. I have it from a source I trust that Chataya contacted him about the job, and he agreed after reading your apparently _very_ extensive specifications.”

“All right,” Brienne says. She can’t help the defensiveness, though she _tries_ to help it, at least a little. She isn’t successful. “What does it matter?”

“It doesn’t, but I think you can stop worrying about any reluctance on his part.”

Brienne tries not to react to that, but Margaery smiles softly at her, which means she isn’t successful. Sometimes Brienne prefers it when she forgets how well Margaery knows her. For all she believes she has hidden herself and her wants well behind the walls she has built, Margaery always seems able to see _something_.

“Is he well known, then?” she finds herself asking, in part to change the subject. “For…being what he is?”

“Oh, yes. Very much so. He’s from a once-prominent political family, you know. Grandmother told me he…”

“I don’t want to,” Brienne says, cutting Margaery off more sharply than she intends. She feels an odd panic at the gossipy tone of Margaery’s voice. Margaery knows everything, and everyone, and it’s usually such a boon to Brienne. But she can’t hear it now. She wants to trust Jaime, and she also wants Jaime to feel like he can trust her in turn. “I don’t want to know anything about him that he isn’t willing to tell me himself.”

Margaery is surprised by the initial interruption, but she softens almost immediately, and she reaches across the table and covers Brienne’s hand with her own. _Just as Jaime did_ , Brienne thinks.

“Forgive me,” Margaery says. “You know how I am about gossip.”

“I do. And I’m sorry for being so short.”

“I know how _you_ are about trust.” Margaery smiles, and she squeezes Brienne’s hand once before releasing it and then lapsing back into the wry, sardonic Margaery that Brienne knows so well. “So. How did you like him?”

“He was…I don’t know. Fine? Handsome. I think he was…kind. It’s difficult to say.”

“You didn’t fuck, I gather, or you wouldn’t be able to look at me without blushing.”

“No. I wanted to…” She stops herself. She trusts Margaery. She loves Margaery. But Margaery doesn’t need to know about her fears. About her desire to ease into things. Test the waters. Both because Margaery is brave about things like that, and also because Brienne knows she could not explain. “Not yet.”

Margaery nods. If she’s disappointed, she hides it well. It looks more like pride. Pride, perhaps, that Brienne went through with it and didn’t send Jaime away.

“What did he tell you to call him?” she asks before she goes. On her way out, over her shoulder, like it’s something she’s just realized she should ask. Brienne frowns.

“Jaime,” she replies. “He said his name was Jaime.”

“Huh,” Margaery says. Her smile grows. “What an interesting choice.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is, uh, a 7k conversation? literally, it is 7k and a single scene. i don't know what this fic is, as usual
> 
> also, just a reminder: there is not a lot of smut in this entire story!! it's barely got any!!! please don't be hoping for that lmao

Brienne’s first official appointment with Jaime isn’t for five days. She doesn’t think about him at all for three of them. But in the two days leading up to their next meeting, she anticipates him more than she was expecting to. The first three days are filled with meetings and interviews and exhaustion, and by the time the fifth day rolls around, she’s tempted to cancel on him and just spend the evening in the bath with a good book, instead. But Margaery is so excited for her, and Brienne supposes that she wants to see him too. Their first meeting was an odd one, and she still isn’t sure how she feels about all of it, but there’s a quiver of _something_ within her when she thinks about his piercing green eyes and the seeming softness of his golden curls.

He knocks on her door at the allotted time. The hall has been temporarily cleared of security, and there’s no one there to see him knocking. Margaery likes nothing better than getting to use her powers of persuasion and her mischievous nature to help Brienne, and she’s applying herself well this time. She set up a series of accounts to get the money to Chataya and on to Jaime without raising suspicion. She’s come up with iron-clad alibis for each of their planned meetings, and she has ensured that the lobby and elevator are conveniently empty when it’s time for Jaime to be on his way up. King’s Landing is used to these kinds of clandestine arrangements from its politicians, and Margaery always knows how to make the oddest requests sound downright reasonable. Brienne’s secrets are safe, she knows, with Margaery in charge of them.

So it can’t be a fear of discovery that makes Brienne so nervous when she goes to greet him. But it _feels_ like that.

She lets him in. He smiles at her, and he lingers on his way by like he means to kiss her, but he doesn’t. Later, she thinks he was expecting _her_ to do it. She wouldn’t have, though. Even if she’d realized it in time. He sheds his blazer as soon as he enters the living area, and he drapes it carefully over one of the chairs. He’s dressed more formally than before. Brienne can’t decide which look suits him better.

“Champagne again,” he notes, dryly, like it’s amusing. “You’re still nervous?”

“Yes,” she answers. She doesn’t feel defensive this time like she did the last. She feels better, now, knowing from Margaery that he _chose_ her. Agreed to come back from retirement because something in her requirements interested him. There’s something in her frankness that he seems to appreciate, and he steps closer, looking her over.

“Not too nervous,” he judges, and she shakes her head. Her mouth is a bit dry, and she thinks her hands might be trembling, but no. She’s not too nervous.

“Where shall we start, then?” he asks. The question throws her, for some reason, and she feels…off-centered. Off-balanced. Annoyed with herself for not thinking of it, and annoyed with him for asking. But she asked for someone who would defer to her lead without trying to control her, and she asked for someone who would not be too obsequious, and so of course he is straightforward, and of course he’s waiting for her to tell him what she wants of him.

“What would you suggest?” she asks. Deferring, at least for now, to his experience. He grins at her, and he rakes a hand through his hair.

“I can think of a few things,” he says. She’s always defensive when people look her up and down, the way Jaime is doing now, because they’re not usually about to say something complementary. But there’s something about the way Jaime looks at her that feels _different_. Not just that he looks like he wants her, though he does. But he looks like he’s appreciating her with a kind of eye to the things that Brienne has always appreciated about herself: her strength. Her sturdiness. He looks at her not like he’s imagining her smaller or prettier or more ornamental, but like she is built for exactly the purpose for which he wants to use her. Like she is enough for him, as she is. It’s a thrilling thing, she thinks, though she worries what it says about her, for her to be so eager for that kind of approval from a man she still does not know.

“A few things? Like what?”

“Well, I could fuck you.”

She blushes. Of course she blushes. She blushes at everything, and she was not expecting that. She watches his gaze flit down around her neck, and she knows that the blush has spread there. She can feel it blotching on her chest.

“Or you could fuck me,” he continues blithely.

“ _Jaime_.”

“I’m just throwing out ideas.”

“I know you’re…”

“Being very kind and trying to get you your money’s worth?”

“I don’t want you to be _kind_ ,” she growls out, and something flashes across his face. She saw the same look last time, too, she thinks. Admiration and amusement and sympathy and something else she doesn’t recognize.

“No, you don’t,” he agrees quietly. “I wonder if you would rather I was cruel so you’d have the excuse to call this off. Instead, I’m only confusing enough to keep you thinking you can do it while also keeping you from feeling safe.”

“I feel safe.” Her argument sounds thin and useless even to her. “I trust Chataya. And she wouldn’t have sent you to me if she didn’t trust you.”

“No, she wouldn’t. But you don’t trust me not to be cruel to you. Inwardly, if not aloud. And you’ll assume it of me even if you can’t see a hint of it on my face, won’t you? You should know that one of the reasons Chataya chose me is that I’m very open. If I truly disliked you, you’d know it.”

“That can’t be true.”

“Why not?”

“I know that you’re…highly regarded. Highly sought after.”

“Oh, yes. And I’m very pleasant to the clients I like. And I’m very _un_ pleasant to the clients I don’t. Some people prefer that.”

“Do they really?” Brienne asks, and Jaime grins, beckoning her over to the couch across the suite. She goes, hesitant but interested, and she trusts his casual demeanor. Everything about his body language is open, and inviting. Non-threatening. Like he is conscious that he could hurt her so easily. She sits, and he sits too, and they are mismatched in that as they are in anything. She sits formally, her back straight, her legs crossed. Jaime lounges. One leg is tucked under him, and he’s facing her, one elbow braced on the back of the couch. He holds his hand out, palm flat. He doesn’t ask for her trust, but his expression does. She gives him her hand. He holds it between both of his own, enveloping it in a shocking warmth. She thinks her hand must be freezing to the touch. 

“People want all sorts of things,” Jaime says, idly. He holds her hand loosely with his bottom one, but his other hand moves against her own. His thumb brushing over the skin on the back. His fingers caress hers, as careless and gentle as his voice. “I’ve been in this business a long time. Sometimes people _want_ me to hate them. Sometimes they want me to love them. Mostly it’s not about _me_ at all. I don’t think there’s anything you could ask me for that would surprise me.”

“It’s not that I’m concerned about surprising you,” she says. Jaime’s fingertips dance over her knuckles. Trace down the sides of her fingers. She can’t seem to choose between looking at his fingers and looking into his eyes. They’re intent. Fingers and eyes together are practiced, purposeful. He watches her carefully, as if transfixed, but she sees the calculation behind it. She imagines it’s likely something that he’s learned. To make a person feel wanted. Desired. Looking at her like that. Like she matters.

“You’re concerned about disgusting me,” he guesses, and she doesn’t nod, but she doesn’t shake her head, either. He smirks at her a little. He turns her hand over. His fingers keep moving. His thumb presses into the center of her palm. Small touches, like he’s feeling his way across a minefield, and sparks shiver up her arms and across her shoulders with every one, making her want to hunch. Force herself smaller.

It’s odd that she’s only now realizing how infrequently she touches people. When she does touch, it’s mostly shaking of the hands, or the occasional embrace from a person close enough to reach for a more affectionate gesture. A kiss on the cheek, perhaps. But this is different. All the same parts, just her hand in his. But it’s…

She feels…pathetic. She starts to draw her hand away, gently, but he exerts just the slightest pressure, and he tilts his head. A look that asks for her patience. _Just a little while_ , it seems to say. _Just see how it feels._

She lets him keep it. Lets his fingers move down to her wrist, to the sensitive skin she usually keeps buttoned up under the sleeves of her shirts, covered further by blazers. She’s wearing a soft gray sweater tonight, and his fingers probe gently past the fabric of her sleeve, and his thumb brushes over where he can probably feel her pulse pounding. It’s still pathetic. Still telling how much the gentleness can thrill her. It shouldn’t be like this. People don’t feel like this from simple touches. It’s because she has never been touched like this before. Idly. It’s because she isn’t _right._

Jaime quiets the panic, though. That same, shameful panic she’s always felt when she thinks about the fact that she has done everything at the exact wrong speed. She became queen too young, maybe. Too young, and then ten years went by, and it’s like she _forgot_ to tend to her personal life with the same careful care with which she has tended to her reign. She remembers being twenty and thinking that already it was too late. _Everyone else has already had sex by now_ , she’d been sure. She’d missed her chance to do it with a boy who _also_ didn’t know what he was doing. She thought, at the time, that she needed that. Like she could only learn by learning alongside someone who was also new to it. She was too embarrassed, too afraid to get it wrong in front of someone who actually knew what he was doing. She’s always been a little competitive, and it felt like her fear was a part of that. There was always, when she was young, this unspoken _need_ to be better than the boys around her. They would not believe that she could do it unless she proved that she could. Sports and working out and playing games. She was friends with a lot of boys growing up on Tarth, and she always thought that she would secure their affections only if she proved that she could keep up. It wasn’t until she was older that she realized how much they hated her for being stronger than them. 

When Margaery mentioned, the other night, that she’d guarded her virginity until she was twenty-one and liked a man enough to do it, Brienne was surprised. She showed her surprise, spoke it aloud before she realized how it might sound, but Margaery only laughed.

“People move at different speeds,” she said. “I know it can feel like there’s a pressure. But there’s nothing _wrong_ with you.”

And Brienne knows that. Technically.

If it wasn’t about her…if it was about some other woman, she would say the same thing that Margaery did. _There’s nothing wrong with you. Sex isn’t everything. If you’re not ready, you’re not ready._ And she would believe her own words. She wouldn’t even be lying.

If some reporter stuck a microphone under her nose and said “we all know you’re a virgin. What’s wrong with you?” she knows she would be angry. She would defend herself. She would mean _those_ words, too. She would say that virginity is an outdated construct. She would say that it doesn’t determine a woman’s worth. She would say that everyone should only have sex when they’re comfortable with it, and not because they feel pressured by their peers or by their age.

It’s just harder, maybe. To defend it to herself.

The world doesn’t look like the clichés in the books she read when she was a girl. Even when she was at her most unconfident and unfortunate-looking when she was going through puberty, she still had _friends_. People weren’t shoving her into lockers in the hallway and calling her “virgin” and mocking her openly for her freckles and her wide mouth. There were cruel children, but it wasn’t even most of them. Those cruel children weren’t often very popular themselves. There was no beautiful, shining girl who picked on Brienne and made her feel like she was less. There were a few boys who mocked and teased her, but they were small, and insignificant, and she has left them behind. But there is a voice inside her. A voice that reminds her that _everyone_ went through school and learned cruelty to kids who were different, just like in all those fictional worlds. It tells her that if the truth came out, and if she tried to defend herself, all of those people would look at her and think, “well, yeah, of course she thinks it’s fine to still be a virgin at her age. _Look at her_ ”.

“I don’t want to be like this,” she tells Jaime. She’s not sure she means to say it until she does, but his fingers are still brushing over the skin of her wrist, and that makes it harder for her to think about keeping her thoughts to herself.

“Like what?” he asks. She thinks about how to say it. He looks at her so probingly that she’s sure he must know, but the question seems sincere.

“Afraid,” she says.

“Of me? Or of what you want? Because I’m telling you…” He grins, a little helplessly. “Nothing you want is in any way abnormal or displeasing.”

“My Hand told me that you’d retired.”

His fingers twitch slightly on her wrist, but that’s the only indication that he’s surprised by what she said. He tilts his head slightly to one side to look at her more critically.

“Does that bother you?”

“No. It made me feel…better.”

He relaxes a little. Leans back into the cushions a little more. He still holds on to her wrist, but it’s looser, and his fingers start to idly stroke against her skin again.

“I see,” he says. “Because I took the job.”

“I know that Chataya’s workers are well treated. I wouldn’t have enlisted her services if I wasn’t sure of that. But still I have trouble believing…well.”

“I told you that it’s not a problem, right?” Jaime asks. “I meant it.”

“I know, but I…”

“I know what you’re going to say. You might as well stop trying.” Jaime’s voice is soothing, gentle, but teasing just slightly in a way that makes her face flame and heat up with annoyance. She snatches her hand away, and Jaime sighs, and lets her. She pulls it back into her lap, like it’s an injured creature that she needs to protect, and Jaime spreads his hands open, supplicating. “You didn’t want me to feel like I had to fuck you, if I wasn’t up for it. That tells me that you have some reason to think that I wouldn’t want to. I’m not a complete idiot, you know. I did this for a living, and I was very good at it, and as you can tell by now, it’s always more than just sex. I’ve fucked plenty of people who’ve asked for more and stranger and have considered my feelings on the matter far less. Because Chataya has always made it clear that I choose what I wish to engage in, and I have never had a reason to think that she would not respect that choice.” He’s very intense, very serious. She wonders which version of him is closest to the real one. The man he is when he isn’t performing. This professionalism is easier to take, but she liked the softness of the man who took her hand and touched her gently because he saw that she was afraid. She is worried that she has done away with that man completely with her obstinacy. “You think that you have no charms. Nothing to attract another person to you. You’re wrong.”

Her face flashes more, and she nearly gets up, stalks across the room, but in the end she stays sitting. He’s right, of course. That’s the painful part. It wouldn’t be painful at all if he didn’t name exactly what she was thinking.

“I know what I am,” she says.

“I’m sure you do. You’re a successful ruler. You’re a peaceful leader with progressive policies who has done a lot to repair the reputation of her seat after her father left it with a few stains.”

“My father—”

“Was a fine man, and a good king. But you’re a better queen, and I think you know _that_ , as well.”

“He didn’t have the same people helping him that I do.”

He laughs, at that, and he holds his hand out again. She hesitates, but she gives hers back to him, and his smile is a grateful one. He pushes up the sleeve of her sweater, and his fingers brush over her forearm. She thinks of wading into the ocean near home. Taking it a few steps at a time. It’s like he’s getting her used to the heat of him. The sensation of touch. Talking to her gently. Touching her gently. Maybe that’s embarrassing, too. That she needs to be won over like a stubborn horse.

“You’re being modest, because you have to be modest, because it’s not _polite_ to claim aloud that you’re intelligent and have made intelligent choices for your people. But it’s all right. I know you know it. You didn’t _need_ good people. Margaery Tyrell was a good choice of Hand, and the rest of your cabinet is worthy enough. But you’re the one who leads them. You’re the one who inspires them. I quite admire you myself.”

“No you don’t,” she says, half-laughing, and he ticks one eyebrow up at her.

“And why not?”

“I—” She has no idea, really, why she even said that. “You don’t have to…I don’t know. Butter me up.”

“No, I don’t. But I want you to be comfortable, so we’re just talking. And I’m not lying. You’ve done good work with the Stormlands. I thought about retiring to Tarth at one point, actually. Did you know it’s ranked the happiest place in the Seven Kingdoms? I’m sure you did. You’ve probably got that magazine article framed in your office.”

She really does laugh at that.

“I don’t. But my assistant does.”

“It didn’t rank nearly that high during your father’s reign, you know. I think Riverrun had it beat.”

“You _think_? I think you know very well.”

“You’re right. I was just being polite. _You_ pretend you don’t know that you’re a better ruler than your father ever was, and _I_ pretend that I’m not politically engaged and intelligent. They’re both kinds of performance. But you’re worried about _me_ performing. Pretending. You don’t have to. I won’t perform any more than anyone else, and I wasn’t lying. I do admire you. I admire you for your policies, and you have a very steady way of doing interviews.”

“Boring, you mean.”

“Well, yes, but that isn’t always such a bad thing. I’m sure _some_ people find it very amusing to watch people like Grand Maester Pycelle prattle on about the gods know what, but you never waste any time.”

Brienne looks up from her wrist, and his fingers on it, and she catches Jaime’s eyes. He’s still watching her. He looks amused, but not cruelly so, and she cannot help but smile back at his expression.

“You’re not lying,” she decides.

“No. I rarely do. It doesn’t really serve me. I tell the truth and laugh, and everyone _thinks_ I’m lying. That’s more my style.”

“You’re not laughing now.”

“No, because you need me not to laugh.”

“Is that not performance, then?”

“No, it’s courtesy. I _am_ capable of it. I’m sure Chataya told you otherwise. _Jaime’s a good man, but it might take you a while to realize that, because he’s also a shit._ ”

“She was very complimentary about you.”

“Well, good. She should be. I’m very good at what I do.”

“So you said.”

“Unlike you, I don’t feel the need to be falsely humble anymore. I never did, really, but I’ve gotten worse with old age.”

“Old age,” she snorts, and he grins and moves a little closer. She feels like a fish, being reeled in. She always hated fishing. Always hated the risk that she would hook a fish through the eye or hurt it. Her father always said that it was all right. _Fish don’t feel pain_ , he said, but Brienne was sure that wasn’t true. Does Jaime ever feel sick, reeling in people like her? Lying to them and making them feel good and saying whatever they need? Or does he feel the same way she does when she smiles and negotiates and argues her way through getting an important bill passed? You do what you have to. You grin and bear it. And you _help_ people.

“Why _did_ you agree to this?” she asks.

“In general? Or you specifically?”

“Me. Your reasons for choosing this line of work are your own, and I won’t ask them. But I wondered what about my case spoke to you.”

“You don’t want to hear about how I chose a life of prostitution to piss off my father? It’s a good story. But for you, it’s simpler: Chataya said I was exactly what you wanted, and I’m a vain man who likes to be flattered.” At her doubting expression, he laughs softly, and when he next speaks, it’s more sincere. _Too_ sincere, almost. It feels like a punch in the stomach, the way he looks at her when he says it. “You wanted affection. You wanted someone to talk to. You wanted someone to hold your hand. I liked that. I think we could all use more of that. _Companionship._ Myself included. And you said I didn’t have to fuck you, which was what pushed me over the edge into accepting. Not because I have no intention of fucking you: I have every intention of it as long as you still want me to. But I was curious to meet a person who would hire one of the most expensive escorts in King’s Landing and then tell him he only has to fuck if he’s interested.”

“Now you know,” she says.

“Now I know,” he agrees. “It’s no great mystery. A lack of confidence.”

She laughs, though her throat is dry, and her laughter comes out dry as well. Dry and wry and halfway biting.

“You make it sound so…”

“Common?” Jaime asks. “Isn’t it?”

“But you have to admit. I’m…”

“What, Brienne?” he prompts, when she fails to finish. Floundering because he won’t say the words aloud, speak it _for_ her. She’d even said it like a joke, like she was just being light, and teasing, but he has seen through it; of course it wasn’t a joke. She does this all the time. Hides her true hurt feelings behind bald statements and rolled eyes and dry deflections. She thinks the hurtful words first, before they can be said to her. Jaime knows that. She can see that he knows that, and it feels suddenly like such a weak, impossible defense. “Tall? You are that. You’re the tallest woman I’ve ever met. I find that intriguing. And if you think it’s a negative, you’re wrong.” He still holds her forearm loosely in his hands, but now he releases it so that he can tick off her features on his fingers as he talks. “Your frame. You’d probably say it’s big, or bulky, if you were feeling down on yourself, or if you were trying to describe yourself in a way that makes it clear you don’t think it’s anything special. But I know you’re proud of it, because you’re strong. You’re not just strong: you _look_ strong. You spend a lot of time at the gym, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she admits. Jaime is watching her intently, so she continues, “I thought, if I was going to be big, I might as well be strong, too.”

“Yes, and I’m sure I’ll be thanking you for it at some point.” Jaime speaks plainly, like alluding to their eventual sex is just normal conversation. Maybe it is, for him, but it makes her blush. “You blush at everything,” he notes, ticking it off, holding up another finger. “Which you probably hate, because it makes it easy to see what you’re thinking. I like it, because it makes my job a bit easier. I’d bet you only wear the little bit of makeup you do because you think it hides the blush. And it does, somewhat, but not enough. Your chest…”

“Yes, I know,” she admits with a sigh. “It gets blotchy.”

“It’s endearing,” Jaime says, as if he’s describing the weather. “Your nose has been broken. Possibly more than once. I can’t tell you how much that makes me want you.”

“ _What_? Why?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know why half the things that make me hard make me hard, but they do.”

Again, he speaks so plainly that she can’t really disbelieve him, but…she reaches her finger up to touch the broken line of her nose, and Jaime’s eyes follow the movement, and she blushes again, and this is, maybe, one of the most terrible moments of her life, but she cannot bring herself to tell him to stop. How will he describe all of it? He isn’t leering, or trying to seduce her. He’s speaking plainly, and he’s saying things that she never dared to believe that people would say, and she _believes_ him! He knows he doesn’t need to say these things. He has no reason to. And yet he’s saying them anyway, and it makes a difference, she thinks.

“My freckles,” she says, and Jaime smiles.

“That one’s obvious,” he says. “There are two schools of thought on freckles, I know. Anyone who doesn’t think they’re adorable is an idiot. I won’t use the line about wanting to see if you’re freckled all over, because at this point it’s such a cliché.”

“Is it?” she asks.

“It is. Did you really not know? Gods, You’re so…” He sounds utterly flabbergasted by her, and he looks at her as if searching for a word. She’s not sure she wants him to find it.

“What?” she prompts, anyway.

“I don’t know. It’s not naïve. It’s just…you could have found so much solace, I think, if you had been willing to look for it. But you protected yourself instead.”

“Quite an assumption.”

“No, not really. I think I’ve done the same thing, in the past. It’s like recognizing like.”

“You think we’re alike,” Brienne says, and she can’t help the surprise in her voice. Jaime hesitates. Just for a second, but she can see the way he processes her words, and she reaches out with her other hand, to lay it on top of his, before she even understands fully what she’s doing. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I was thinking only of my looks. But you were talking of something else, weren’t you?”

“It’s all right. I’m being a fool and talking too much.” Jaime is awkward now, almost uncertain, but he looks down at her hand on top of his, and he smiles a little, and he doesn’t take his away. She takes the opportunity to explore his hand as he had explored hers, and she feels a contentment radiating off of him that might be pride. It’s not that she wants it consciously. It’s not that she thinks “I want him to be proud of me” or “I’m glad that he’s proud of me”, but she does feel _something_ at it. It’s humiliating. She wants to impress him.

It’s funny, though, because it’s the same thing that she does with her therapist. Dr. Goodwin doesn’t care if she’s funny, or wry, or distant from her own trauma. But she wants to make him smile anyway. She wants him to think that she’s _okay_ , and self-aware, and good. She goes to therapy for a host of reasons, and none of those reasons are because she thinks she _is_ fully okay. She’s under so much pressure. She feels lonely every day of her life, even when she has such wonderful friends around her. She constantly questions if she’s doing the right things for her people. She isn’t there because she needs to pass a test, and yet every time she sits down with Dr. Goodwin, it’s like she’s playing a game that she needs to win. What does she think is going to happen if she shows too much vulnerability? She isn’t sure. Nothing, probably. Logically. But it isn’t logical that she’s trying to win a game against her therapist, and she knows that. It’s also not logical now to look at Jaime and try to remain on the defensive. He showed his own vulnerability, and she cut him off. It’s not a vulnerability Brienne is used to recognizing within herself. She has always been royalty, nobility. _You think we’re alike_ , she had asked, and he heard something damning that she hadn’t intended.

It’s just…there is nothing that Brienne can think of that’s more vulnerable than allowing a person to look at you, and touch you. Her own body is always wrapped up tight, hidden beneath layers and layers so that people can’t even see the shape of it. She’s not ashamed. Jaime was right when he said that. She’s proud of her body, and of what she has made of it, but maybe there is a part of her that feels like she _should_ be ashamed. It’s not difficult to believe that _other_ women, women who aren’t her, should be proud of their bodies and what they can do with them. Proud of every size and shape. But when it comes to her own…

She cannot escape that cruel inner voice. It’s not an outer one. She knows that everything that Jaime has been saying tonight is true: she _is_ a good queen. People _do_ admire her. Her people love her. Not everyone, no, but not everyone is _ever_ going to love a politician, especially a royal, and she knows that many of the people who hate her are people who don’t support her most progressive ideas, and she would rather that those people not support her anyway! She is confident. She is a good person. She is a kind person. Her friends love her. She _knows_ this. She’s proud of the person she is. But that _voice_.

She knows that she has a choice. She can allow that voice to rule her here, with Jaime. She can allow that voice to talk her down with every breath that Jaime is trying to talk her up. Or she can shut that voice up, and she can take control.

She can be confident. She has been confident every time she has strode into a meeting with the kings and queens of the other kingdoms, knowing that she is going to have to argue with many of them for the smallest concessions. She has never backed down on those days, and she doesn’t see why she should be expected to back down from this one. Jaime isn’t the one criticizing her body. _She’s_ the one doing that. Jaime isn’t the one telling her to hide behind layers. Jaime is trying to get her to see the value that lies beneath them. Jaime is a professional, yes, and he’s helping her as a professional would, just like Dr. Goodwin. Maybe it’s unhealthy to keep thinking of them as the same, but it’s the effect that’s similar. He has seen where the problem lies, and he is trying to fix it. Or help _her_ fix it, anyway.

She wants to let him. She wants to take off her soft gray sweater, and she wants to take off the thin shirt beneath it, and she wants to unhook her bra and let his hands touch her there. His fingers on hers, and on her wrist, and on the softest skin of her forearm are all thrilling, and it’s like she hasn’t even had _time_ to consider that his hands could touch the rest of her, too. The places no one has ever touched.

“You aren’t talking too much,” she says. “You know it’s what I need. To hear it.”

“Do you need more? Because I can keep going.”

“I don’t know. Maybe not right now.”

She tries to get more comfortable on the couch, and Jaime watches her. She tries to be natural. Tries to breathe. Tries to be as languid as he is. Unconcerned. Maybe she doesn’t accomplish that, but she _is_ comfortable. She _is_ all right. She _is_ content. She’s still afraid, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t ready to face it. Jaime is looking at her from so close by, and he’s beautiful. Her perfect man. He’s an ideal of a person. Someone who was picked for her by a woman who knows the industry better than anyone else. A woman Brienne trusts. He came out of retirement _for_ her, because something about her spoke to him. She’s grateful, but it isn’t _just_ gratitude. She’s relieved. She’s terrified. There’s been no reason yet to send him away, and that means that she’s not going to be given a pretty excuse. Either she’s going to have to choose to send him away and admit to herself that it’s because she isn’t ready, or she’s going to have to choose to accept him, and go for what she wants.

From the outside, the answer is obvious. It’s obvious from the inside, too, as much as she is also afraid. She wants this. She does. It’s only herself that she has to overcome, and she has spent her life doing exactly that. Overcoming herself. Overcoming the parts of herself that have always believed in herself too little. Those parts aren’t the whole of her.

_He has been doing this a long time, and you aren’t special_ , she tells herself. _You aren’t unusual. Not to him. He knows people like you. Has been with people like you._ She takes comfort in that, in knowing that at least one of them knows what they’re doing. Not just the mechanics of sex. But just…generally. He knows what he’s doing. He knows what she’s looking for. He’s comfortable taking the lead, and he will be comfortable when she inevitably wants to take the lead back, when she’s more comfortable. There’s something freeing in having established her preferences from the beginning. There will be no surprises now, not from her, and if he is prepared to take on the weight of them, if he thinks he is strong enough to bear them, then she can show him no better courtesy than believing him, and letting him. It would be a courtesy to herself, too, she thinks.

“I’m here for you,” he tells her. “It’s your choice, and we will move only at the speed at which you are comfortable. You know that, don’t you?”

“I do,” she says, and she does. “I don’t think I’m used to asking for what I want. I don’t think…”

“Most people aren’t,” he says, when she falters. “Though you’re the first highborn client I’ve ever had who’s had trouble with it.”

She can’t even be self-conscious about that, because he’s grinning at her, and she has to laugh.

“Am I really?” she asks.

“You are. Not that I mind, either way. Taking orders can be fun. It’s just an observation. It’s also worth noting that most people work their way up to me. They don’t go for King’s Landing’s most expensive whores on their first trip.”

She laughs at that, too, and she hides her face in her hands, and Jaime laughs with her. Something has loosened in her chest. The lump in her throat that was keeping her tightly wound and too frightened to release the tension that has been building in her. She doesn’t feel like the tension releases, necessarily, but it loosens. Jaime is touching her arm as he laughs. Gently, personably, like it’s natural, not calculated like everything else. She isn’t sure she can bring herself to sink quite as low as believing it, but…she doesn’t hate it, either. She can know that it’s fake and appreciate it at the same time, can’t she?

“Chataya made the choice for me,” she reminds him, but she’s smiling, and not really arguing, and he seems to know it. His whole demeanor is more open than before. Like he feels, even though her outward behavior hasn’t changed, that she has made a choice.

“Chataya chose me because you were very specific, and very picky, and I was the only person in the whole of Westeros who could have met your standards.”

“Oh, gods. You weren’t kidding about being vain, were you?”

His laugh this time is a loud, unreserved thing. She laughs along helplessly, and he takes her hand in his, and he lifts her wrist to his mouth, and he kisses it. Her laughter dies, replaced by confusion, by a surge of want. It’s such a pointless, meaningless gesture. Unthinkingly made by a man who touches her like she was made to be touched, like he has not thought of anything but touching her since he walked in the door. It’s good. It’s _too_ good. She knows she will have to walk a very fine line to keep from falling for it too much, but she knows that she can do it. It’s just... The intimacy of the gesture is surprising.

“It was a gratifying message to receive,” he says. “When Chataya contacted me.” He must notice that she has frozen. The tension isn’t back, but she is having trouble raising her eyes from the spot where he pressed his lips against her skin. “I should have expected you.”

“What do you mean by that?” She’s surprised that she doesn’t feel defensive. She would have, she thinks, even at the beginning of this evening, but Jaime’s teasing expression and his kind eyes don’t make her feel defensive anymore. She feels instead bowled over by him. Touched by him. _Seen_. It’s not comfortable, exactly, but neither is it _un_ comfortable.

“You showed a strange regard for my level of comfort. That should have tipped me off right away. You didn’t want me to be deferent, or intimidated by you. From what I have seen from you as a queen, you live by that, and rule by that. You’ve never been linked to anyone publically, so maybe I should have surmised it from your craving for intimacy and tenderness. It must be lonely.”

“It is,” Brienne confirms, when he seems to be waiting. Jaime makes a quiet, unhappy sound, and he kisses her wrist again. Again, she feels those pleasant tingles where his lips are pressed, and in the spots where his fingers gently hold her hand. She is almost breathless, but it doesn’t feel pathetic anymore.

“You aren’t afraid to give up control. You’re happy to admit your inexperience and your desire to be taught. But you don’t _want_ to give up control. There’s a difference, and I should have seen you in it. Not that you can tell who a person is through what they want out of sex. In hindsight, it just seems obvious. If I wasn’t so good about keeping secrets, I could tell you some shocking stories about people who wanted the most surprising things.”

“I’m sure you could,” Brienne allows.

“No curiosity at all?”

“I’m trying to be respectful of your privacy agreements. Of _course_ I’m curious.”

Jaime grins. This time, he kisses her on the inner arm, pushing her sleeve up gently as he does.

“That’s very good of you,” he says, and it might be sardonic, but there is too much kindness in his tone. Too much gentleness. He _does_ think she’s good.

On a whim, driven by some impulse she doesn’t understand, she reaches out her free hand, and she allows her fingers to brush over his, where it holds her arm. She watches his eyes for any wariness, any sign that he wants her to stop, but he nods, and he releases her hand, allows her to touch him. She holds his hand in both of hers, and she is gentle. She does not often have cause to be gentle like this. Her hands are large, and made for strength. His are, too, but she’s already seen how tender he can make them. He’s barely touched her at all, and already she’s seen it. She wants to emulate it. Be a gentleness in turn.

She mimics him. Kisses his wrist. Kisses the inside of his arm. She watches his eyes every time, and she sees how they are blown out, the pupils wide. It’s curious. She didn’t expect him to want her, or to want what she’s doing at all. _Enduring_. She expected him to endure it. But he’s not. He’s looking down at her lips on his skin, and he _wants_.


	4. Chapter 4

Chataya stops by to check in with Brienne the following day.

The first thing she asks is how Brienne feels, and Brienne is…not embarrassed. She just has trouble talking about these things. When it was happening, when she was touching him, it felt right. It felt brave. Now, in the light of morning, she doesn’t recognize the woman she briefly became, and it’s made worse by the fact that she knows, from the outside, that she and Jaime actually did very little. He touched her. She touched him. They never even kissed. It’s nothing to be proud of.

“It was nice,” she admits. “But I’m still…nervous.” Terrified is a better word. Terrified because she wants him, and terrified because she knows she can have him. Crushes were always safe, when she’s had them in the past. She had them from a distance, and that was the way she liked it, because it was safe. She likes Jaime. She’s attracted to Jaime. Jaime is willing to have her. That’s never happened to her before. Those things never line up. It’s not a crush, necessarily. She knows too little about him to say that. But she wants him. Isn’t that close enough? 

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,” Chataya reminds her. “You’re not going to disappoint anyone if you decide you don’t want to go through with it. Jaime will understand, and so will I, and so will Margaery, as much as she likes to cheerlead you. None of us want you to feel any pressure. We’re here for _you_.”

“I know that. I know. There are some things that are just…difficult to unlearn.” 

“The lessons we teach ourselves are often the hardest to let go of, and you’ve lived a very extraordinary life.” Chataya says that like it’s so simple. Like Brienne has no reason to worry. She doesn’t say that Brienne is being too hard on herself, or that Brienne should lighten up. She’s just _understanding_. Brienne’s not sure that she can be so kind to herself. She still feels like she should be better than this. More ready than this. Less humiliated by everything. But it’s a relief to hear acceptance in Chataya’s voice. Brienne’s experiences haven’t been like anyone else’s, and Chataya’s tone reminds her of that. There is nothing wrong with being different the way Brienne is. She was raised as a princess, and is living now as a queen, and those things have left their marks. She has always been tall, and she is considered ugly by the standards of society, and as much as she has learned to live with it, it does _linger,_ the way Jaime said. Scars she gave herself and scars that others imparted. They all add up, etching into her insides.

But she thinks she can pretend. If this is something that she really wants, and she thinks that it is, then she can do it. That’s how she’s always been. Determined. Implacable once she’s settled on a course. She just needs to settle on it first.

“I’m trying,” she says, and Chataya smiles.

“I think you’re being very brave, and I think that Jaime is the right person to help you. But if you want someone else…”

“No! No. Jaime is…I like Jaime.” The lameness of that statement makes her bristle a bit, because it’s _more_ than like. She’s attracted to Jaime, yes. Jaime is patient, and kind, yes. She hasn’t figured him out yet. He’s still a mystery. But she understands him better than she thought she was going to, and she feels more comfortable with him, too. Or, when she _is_ uncomfortable, she’s comfortable _with_ the discomfort. Jaime is exactly the man she described when she told Chataya what she was looking for, both physically and in the more formless desires that she wasn’t sure she described correctly.

He has been attentive to her. Kind and gentle with her fears, without making her feel like he’s reading off a script, or treating her so gently out of pity. He hasn’t tried to wrest control. He hasn’t tried to convince her that what she needs is a good strong fucking, which was half of what she was afraid of, because her limited experience with porn has told her that men like to dominate, and that they like to be rough, and she doesn’t _want_ that. When she thinks of having to meet some other man, allow herself to be so seen by some other man, she balks. One man is enough, isn’t it? She doesn’t want to do it all over again. Jaime is alarming sometimes, and sardonic, and he makes her wish for stronger armor, and he makes her defensive. She never knows if she’s reading him correctly. But all of that is thrilling in the way that dangerous things _can_ be thrilling, and she knows she is brave enough to keep going.

“Your comfort is what matters to me,” Chataya says. “And it’s what matters to Jaime, too. I know he has an odd way of showing it. He can be abrasive. But his heart is good, and he will treat you the way you deserve to be treated.”

“I believe you,” Brienne says, because she does, because she has seen glimpses of it in the way that Jaime watches her, making sure she’s comfortable before he does anything. He’s not anxious in the same way she is anxious, but there’s a kind of anxiousness in him that she likes to see. A professional kind of anxiousness. In the same way she’s learned to read the moods of the people she works with, he watches her to ensure that she’s comfortable, and that he’s doing his job well. _Getting your money’s worth_ , he called it, that first day, and Brienne hadn’t known exactly what that meant, but she thinks it’s something like this: Jaime’s kindness, his gentleness, his attention to what _she_ wants rather than what he _thinks_ she wants. She had expected, or perhaps feared, that this experience would happen a certain way. That she would defer and defer to him because he would know what he was doing and she would be afraid to displease him. Afraid to be embarrassed by him. It _hasn’t_ gone that way at all. She has sometimes been embarrassed, yes. That’s true. Sometimes been defensive. She still isn’t entirely comfortable around him. Like he’s something she has yet to fully learn. Some new skill she hasn’t yet mastered. But it hasn’t been anything like she feared. It could have been, so easily, she thinks. She is not an easy woman to get a read on. She knows this for a fact. Another man might not have understood how to get behind her walls. Another man might have taken her stoicism at face value, or her defensiveness for a sign that she did not want him. She hasn’t been drawn out very far, she doesn’t think. She still feels like she is locked away, safe, protected. But Jaime has managed to get her out farther than she expected. She knows that beyond all the slyness and the cockiness that she is sometimes troubled by, he _does_ care. He wants her to be happy with this experience. He wants her to feel safe. She could not ask for a better person.

“Good,” Chataya says. She squeezes Brienne’s hand once, and it doesn’t tingle in quite the same way it does when Jaime touches her. Brienne notices this, now, when she wouldn’t have given it a thought before. “I’ll tell him to come back tonight?”

“Yes,” Brienne says.

* * *

That night, something happens to her. Or maybe it happened to her when Chataya smiled at her. Or maybe it happened last night, after Jaime left, and Brienne lay alone in her bed, feeling thrilled and frustrated in equal measure. When he arrives that night, and she closes the door behind him, he stands close to her in the small hall that leads to the main room of the suite. He’s almost of a height with her, which is rare enough, but he still has to look up slightly into her eyes, and there is a challenge there that she can read. It has been there every night before this one, but she has ignored it. Resisted it. This time, she hesitates.

“Go on,” he says.

She kisses him.

It is her first kiss.

She doesn’t tell him that. It’s one of the things she has always been so ashamed of. Most girls have probably managed to get through school being kissed at least once, but not Brienne. She somehow slipped through. And then the years passed, and Renly happened, and aside from a few chaste pecks on the cheek from him, there was nothing. How was she supposed to trust anyone enough to kiss them after that? She had read Renly so incorrectly. How could she trust her own instincts after _that_?

And then, as she got older: how was she supposed to admit to anyone that she had never been kissed before? What kind of monster has never been kissed? They would laugh at her. Think something was wrong with her. Just like the virginity, perhaps even worse than the virginity, it was something that she would _never_ judge another person for, but she judges herself so harshly.

She was afraid, and she _is_ afraid, but she isn’t so afraid that it stops her from kissing him. One of his hands is on her chest, palm flat and warm where her shirt dips down into a V. The other hand is on her neck. Her skin, she’s sure, is red and blotchy, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He makes a small, satisfied sound as he kisses her back.

When she pulls away, he’s grinning. He looks…well. He looks like he has been kissed. She wonders what _she_ looks like. She ignores the impulse to look into the mirror by the door and see for herself. She knows what she will see. Lips more swollen, perhaps. Face red. Neck red as well. But she will not see anything else. No sign, no difference to mark this rite of passage. No shameful indication that this was her first. She had not been kissed before tonight, and now she has been. She’s almost thirty. That shouldn’t matter as much as it does. She didn’t think it did. But her chest aches for thinking about it. Maybe she _did_ care. Maybe she was only pretending to herself when she told herself that she didn’t mind it.

“Good evening, your grace,” Jaime says, teasingly, the way he does sometimes. He affects a little bit of a bow, and she scowls at him.

“I just…”

He shakes his head at her, and he kisses her again. This time, she feels him rising up to meet her, on his toes, and she almost laughs, because it feels like it should seem ridiculous. But she can’t laugh, because it _doesn’t_ seem ridiculous. It seems…amazing. She can’t think about it. Can’t do anything but react. Jaime is kissing her. He’s kissing her well. She takes a few stuttering steps back until the wall can hold her up, and then Jaime’s hand is on her hip, gripping her, and his body is pressed against hers, and he’s still kissing her.

“Don’t apologize,” he says between kisses. And then, “I’ve been waiting for you to do it.”

She believes him. She wants to believe him, so she does. She makes herself believe him.

“I needed to,” she starts. Stops. “I knew I needed to make…the first step.”

“You were right. Are you ready to make a second?”

“What’s the second?” she asks, suspiciously, and Jaime laughs, and he kisses her cheek, and the tip of her nose, and then her lips again. Affectionate, gentle pecks.

“Anything you want,” he says.

_Like a menu_ , she thinks again, and it makes her laugh.

“Anything I want?” she asks. “Surely there are some things you don’t like.”

“Of course there are, but you asked for none of them in your conversation with Chataya. Everything you asked for is something I enjoy, I promise you.”

“Are you sure?” she asks. He softens a bit as he looks at her, and then he kisses her a final time, as if he cannot help himself.

“Yes,” he says. “But you’re good for asking.”

He takes off his coat, and he drapes it in the same place he always does, over one of the chairs, and she is vaguely scandalized to realize that she assailed him before he even had a chance to get comfortable. She wants to apologize again, though she doesn’t, because she knows he’ll just tell her not to. He looks pleased, and he turns back to face her.

“No champagne,” he notes.

“Shut up,” she says, and he laughs.

“I’m glad you’re no longer nervous.”

“Less nervous.”

“Champagne is a symptom of extreme nervousness, then? I’ll remember that. What are you still nervous about? I’ll do what I can to remove it.”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, _that’s_ a lie.”

“It isn’t!”

He grins at her. He’s in a good mood today, she observes. A playful one, too. She wonders if she should flatter herself and attribute it to the fact that she kissed him. There’s no harm in pretending that, is there?

“You know what you’re nervous about. You just don’t want to say it.”

“Well. Fine.” She can admit to that, at least. “You know I’m…it’s not easy. I’m not used to talking about these things.”

“I know. In your position, I’m sure I’d be having trouble with it as well. But sex…I don’t mind talking about sex. Emotions are more difficult, I’ll grant you.”

“Sex _is_ emotions, for me,” she points out. “It’s all tangled up.”

“I suppose that’s true. It was the same for me, once.”

She’s surprised to hear that, and she wants to ask more. How did he get past it? What changed? But Jaime turns away and goes to the couch, and she can see a wall going up behind him. He doesn’t want to talk about that. That makes her even more curious, but she won’t ask. She joins him on the couch, instead, and he leans in towards her, his expression a smirking, teasing dare. She responds to it, as she thinks he wants her to. She kisses him again.

“You’ll get used to it,” he says, once he pulls away, and touches her face, and brushes his thumb over her swollen bottom lip. “Going after what you want.”

“I’ve never been very good at that. Not in my personal life, anyway.”

“Don’t think of this as your personal life, then, if it helps. Think of it as a professional one.”

He’s laughing at her, but not in a cruel way, and so she decides to listen to him. If she was challenged by someone. A Baratheon, perhaps, or a Targaryen. She would push back. Gently, but firmly. She would stand her ground. Refuse to back down. She has always found her strength when someone else thinks they are stronger. She has always enjoyed that thrill. She was never one for debate or arguing, but standing up for what’s right…

So she doesn’t back down. She pushes forward. She kisses him again, captures his lips, makes the choice. She moves closer, and she moves over him, until he has his back pressed against the arm of the couch, his body angled towards hers, laid out obscenely beneath her. He makes a noise into her mouth that her whole body seems to respond to. Not quite a whimper, or a groan, but something heady and _wanting_. She thinks it’s wanting. She breaks the kiss, and he gasps for breath.

“Do you like this?” she asks.

“Yes,” he says, emphatic.

She kisses him again, and for some reason she can’t quite figure out, she reaches for him. Takes another step forward without thinking about it, without _over_ thinking about it. One hand is planted firmly on the arm of the couch, just beside Jaime’s head, and one knee is between his thighs on the couch cushion, and her other hand reaches for his jeans. She trails her fingers up them, feeling the hard line of him beneath the zip. She hardly knows what she’s thinking. She moves her fingers to the button.

She stops, freezes. Catches up to herself. He whines, impatient, his hips moving restlessly, seeking out her hand. His eyes meet hers. His pupils are blown again. He wants, and he nods, and there is something so deliberate and so knowing in his eyes, and it removes every doubt. She did not intend to move this quickly. Perhaps it’s not quickly at all. Her third night hiring an escort, and she is only now getting around to even _seeing_ his cock. But it feels fast to her, when she finally pushes her hand into his pants and wraps her fingers around it.

He makes such an interesting variety of noises. She’s oddly fascinated by it. By the difference in sound when she feels along him, when she kisses him, when she changes her grip. She learns the shape of him with questing fingers. Tentative. Maybe _too_ tentative, from the way he hisses and jerks his hips and half-laughs in frustration but tells her _don’t stop_ when she nearly does. It feels like she’s learning an instrument. Or trying to figure out a new tool. She can’t help but feel separate from this. Like it’s happening to someone else. She’s just so _curious._ It’s such an odd thing for her to be doing. Like she woke up one morning and decided to take up mountaineering. Jaime arches up to capture her mouth, and the noises he makes then are hungry, almost hurt. Like a gut-punched sound, but begging for more of it.

“How,” she starts, because she wants him to show her. _How should I touch you? How do you like it?_

“Here,” Jaime answers, and his hand joins hers, his fingers wrapped around her own. His other hand, he tugs impatiently at his jeans, and he gets them not even halfway down. Just far enough to not impede movement, and Brienne likes that, too, she thinks. The disorganized desperation of it. It feels oddly powerful. The way he twists his hips and writhes and gives up on removing them all the way because her hand is on him and he can’t think. When she was younger, when she’d think about moments like this, she’d think about how _this_ was what men would probably want from her. She knows she has strong hands. She knows she has lips that men like to make comments about. Those anonymous men in those anonymous online spaces. Sometimes she was even glad to know that there was something they’d want from her, though she was always ashamed by it. By her own impulse to try and seek out affirmation from the worst people. Margaery’s brother once said to her “I’ve never felt more powerful than when I have a man’s cock in my mouth,” and Brienne never understood how that could be true, but she understands it now. A few touches, and Jaime is hers. He’s guiding her, teaching her, but he’s losing himself quickly. She hasn’t even done very much. He’s staring up at her, gasping at her, moving beneath her touch. He’s a professional, yes. Perhaps he’s even exaggerating. But he’s very good at it, if that’s the case. His fingers squeeze hers, and so she changes her grip. Follows his lead. She’s always been a fast learner, and soon Jaime’s fingers are clutching her own, not to direct, but to urge onward.

It’s different from what she expected. The heft and feel of it in her hand. She’s seen pictures and videos before, but somehow she was unprepared for the reality of it, and even as it’s happening she’s dimly surprised that she hasn’t just yanked her hand away out of the sheer shock of it. Come to her senses. But she doesn’t. Jaime is too responsive. He says her name, calls her _your grace_ in a way that manages not to upset her. He kisses her face, anywhere he can reach, and as he gets closer, he buries his face in her neck, and she can feel his ragged breaths, so close to her ear. She thrills in it. Delights in it. She understands what Loras meant. _She_ did this, and it’s just her first go.

When he spends, she strokes him through it until his fingers jerk against hers, and then she knows to stop. He fumbles with shaking fingers for a tissue from the box on the table beside the couch, and he wipes her hand without meeting her eyes. She feels embarrassed, suddenly. Embarrassed and yet still wanting. Jaime’s face is pink, and she wonders if it’s a blush, or if it’s just from the rush of it. Did she do that, too? She wonders.

“That was unexpected,” he says, finally, and there’s some of his old charm and amusement back in his voice, but she can tell he’s also shaken, and it worries her.

“In a good way?” she asks, and he laughs again. He pushes himself into a seated position, and he kisses her so fiercely that she cannot doubt it.

“What a question,” he says. “Really, the proof was all over your hand a minute ago. I didn’t think…well. I expected it to be about you.”

“So did I,” she admits. “But I wanted to.”

“A perfectly valid reason for doing anything, and I thank you for it. Gods. Come here. It’s your turn.”

“No, I…” she starts, and she finds that she blocks his hand with her own when he reaches for the hem of her shirt. “I’m not…”

“Ready?” he asks. He’s gentle about it, and kind, and she feels humiliated, but she nods anyway. He looks her over critically. The long sleeves again. The tight black trousers with two buttons and a zip. She doesn’t think she wore her most guarded pair for a reason, but maybe it was subconscious. “Afraid?” he asks. She hesitates, but she nods again, slightly less confident than before.

“Nervous,” she amends. “I trust you.”

He seems taken by that, and his eyes flick up to hers. There’s a softness in them that she likes, and a patience that she needs.

“But,” he prompts.

“But I’m not ready to. To be seen.”

Before she says it, she’s not sure it’s true, and yet once she speaks the words, she believes them. Yes, she’s not ready to be seen, in these harsh lights and in this open space. Jaime is beautiful here, would be beautiful in whatever lighting. Brienne has long made her peace with what her body is, and what it looks like, and what it can do. She loves her body, even if she can’t love it the way she would love a softer figure and a more delicate face. But she doesn’t think she’s ready to be exposed the way Jaime was. Panting, open, red-faced and willing to be ugly as he chased his pleasure. She doesn’t think she could do that.

Jaime stands, a bit unsteady, and he reaches for her hand.

“You trust me?” he prompts, and she nods. She takes it.

“I trust you,” she says.

* * *

He draws the curtains in the bedroom.

“For you,” he reminds her, casually. He urges her back onto the bed. He turns off the lights. He takes off his shirt. She admires him. It all feels vaguely dreamlike. There’s another hotel down the street. The sign on top gives off a deep blue light that filters past the curtains, past the tiny cracks around the edges of the window where the curtains don’t reach. It’s light enough to see by, but it casts everything in a blue glow that feels unreal. She can be seen like this, she thinks. He was right.

She has wanted Jaime from the moment she saw him, and her own pleasure rose inside her as she coaxed him through his own, and she knows that she is ready for this. She feels, too, some tenderness towards him, for the fact that he understood what she needed even when she wasn’t sure how to ask for it. She would have sent him away and just taken care of her needs herself, too unsure of what exactly bothered her. _I’m not ready_ , her instincts had screamed, and that would have been enough reason to draw back. Jaime saw her instincts and asked: _but why, exactly?_ And found a solution. More patient with her than she was willing to be with herself.

She props herself up on the hotel’s fluffy pillows. Makes herself comfortable. She wonders how she would look if she had bothered to wear something sexy instead of just the stuff she wears every day. Business attire. Jaime doesn’t seem to mind, but that’s no surprise. He looks appreciative as he gazes at her long body, laid out on top of the sheets. He’s naked, she realizes. She missed him stripping off the rest of his clothing. He looks magnificent in the blue light as he crawls onto the bed and kneels over her. He kisses her. Gently, but there’s a thrum of promise, of energy, that moves from his lips to hers. _Gods_ , she thinks. _This is real._

She felt so detached when she was touching him. It didn’t feel real when he came apart beneath her fingers and urged her forward and asked her for more. Even when she was climbing onto the bed and watching him take off his shirt, it felt like she was somewhere else. But now, in the blue light, in the dreamlike oddness of this moment, she knows that it’s real, and she doesn’t know what to do with herself. It doesn’t matter. Jaime makes sure she is comfortable. She doesn’t have to do anything at all. He pauses to make sure she’s sure. Asks her kindly, seriously: _are you ready now, do you think_?

_Yes_ , she says, and he kisses her. He’s gentler here than he’s ever been, and she might actually cry, she thinks, though she has no idea why. She is not a breakable creature. She’s not delicate, or easily shattered. But he touches her like she is, and it makes her feel…she doesn’t know. She can’t master this feeling like she has mastered her emotions before. She is swept under by it. He smiles at her. Kisses her, then kisses her cheek, and that’s worse, somehow. It chokes her. He presses his lips to her neck, then, and moves his way down.

It’s her turn to come apart, and she’s surprised at how quickly he moves once he is sure she’s ready. There’s a slowness and a gentleness when he’s pulling off her shirt and urging her out of her trousers, pulling them down her long legs. But once he’s between her legs, he changes. There’s a hunger to him that’s thrilling. When he touches her for the first time and finds her already wet, she’s embarrassed by how openly she wears her want, but he is delighted by it. He kisses up her inner thighs, strokes them, makes her quiver, and then he is like a man possessed. He kisses her, and licks into her, and _laughs_ at her when she makes a choked, garbled sound. She slaps her hand over her mouth, but he pulls back enough to say, “be as loud as you want, Brienne”.

She is not loud. She has trained herself too well into silence. Probing fingers and quiet gasps of pleasure beneath her sheets. She’s gotten quite good at it, actually. Masturbating quietly, in the dead of night, like she fears being overheard even alone in her own home. Like her pleasure has always been a shameful thing. She thinks of the noises that Jaime made, out on the couch, and she wonders if he would find her noises as intoxicating as she found his, but she still can’t bring herself to allow more than a few gasps and a single whimper. She urges him with whispered commands. Her hand finds his hair, at one point. She tugs on it gently, accidentally, and he reacts, jerking against the bed, moaning against her cunt, and she realizes that he is enjoying this. She doesn’t think that’s faked.

It’s a million things that combine to send her over the edge. His mouth and his fingers and his whispered words, and the memory of his gasps and the way his hips jutted up into her hand when she touched him. Hysterically, oddly, almost distractedly, she thinks that she will be thinking about this night every time she touches herself for the rest of her life. When she comes, it’s almost a surprise. She barely has time to realize it’s approaching, and then it’s there, and she falls over the edge, and she nearly _does_ cry out.

After, Jaime crawls up to lounge beside her, looking pleased with himself. He says a few clever things, which she is too overwhelmed to respond to. The blue light makes him look almost fearsomely angelic. Too bright, too sharp, too gleaming. She can’t look away. He tells her that she’s glorious. She believes him, because she can’t _not_. Not with the way the blue light plays over his skin. Not with the way he kisses her. She remembers the accounts that Margaery has set up, paying for this dalliance. She remembers Chataya’s smile, and she remembers her own insistence that the man she would experience all her firsts with would have to have a good heart. She remembers Jaime’s claims that he’s not very good at hiding his displeasure. Yes, she believes him. She will not be the sort of fool who will believe it too much, or believe it to the ruin of herself, but she can believe at least that he is pleased with her, and that she gave him pleasure, and that he was happy to help her. _A good heart. He has a good heart. He will not laugh at you. He will not scorn you._

“Thank you,” she tells him. “This was…it was easier than I expected.”

“Easier,” Jaime repeats, fondly mocking, and he kisses her again, and it feels like he kisses her because he can. “I can go, if you’d like.”

“Oh,” she says. She doesn’t want him to go, but she knows it would be foolish to ask. “Please. Whatever you want.”

He hesitates, and he looks at her searchingly. For what? To make sure she’s okay? She smiles at him to let him know that she is. He kisses her again, and then he gets to his feet. He seems at home in his body in the same way she feels in hers, but only when she’s alone. He’s at home in it even nude, even with an audience. He picks up his clothes, gets back into them at leisure. He offers her a lazy, grinning salute as he leaves her bedroom, and he closes the door gently behind him. Brienne remains in her bed, clutching her covers to her chest, and she cannot stop grinning.

* * *

“I knew he’d be good,” Margaery says, the next morning, over coffee. Brienne smiles, but deflects, and shakes her head.

“Not yet,” she says.

“Still. He was good at whatever you let him do to you.”

“Yes,” Brienne agrees, and Margaery laughs, and she looks genuinely glad, and Brienne feels more and more tension leave her shoulders, until she is feeling nearly free of it. She goes to her meetings that day with her head held high, ready for battle.

She knows what some people would say, if they knew. If they correlated her good mood and her fiery demeanor with her evening spent with King’s Landing’s best retired professional. But it isn’t that. It isn’t just the rush of endorphins or the rush of being wanted, worshipped, of bestowing and receiving pleasure in kind. It’s not that she’s been fucked happy (or almost-fucked happy), or that she _needed_ it to be confident and good at her job. It isn’t. She would be just as complete without it, and she knows this now, and it has taken away some of the humiliation and some of the fear that she has felt since this thing with Jaime started.

Whether she ever lets Jaime fuck her, or whether she never books him again. It wouldn’t change anything about her. She would be just as competent. Just as good a queen. Whether she is untouched or not. Whether any other man ever looks at her the way Jaime looked at her last night or not. It doesn’t matter. She will still be herself, and she truly does believe that she’s _good_. But she feels it, now. A confidence and an easiness. The sensation of letting go of one of the worries that she has been carrying around like a weight around her neck. A weight sometimes unnoticed. Sometimes even forgotten. Not a weight that she could not bear, or carry. But a weight nonetheless.

* * *

The next time she meets with Jaime, she’s more confident. Right away, she kisses him. Claims him. He returns the kiss, and everything in him says that he’s thrilled. She has always been competitive. Determined. She’s not competing with _him,_ though. She’s competing with herself. She takes Loras’s advice, and she pleases him with her mouth while he gasps and writhes and wants above her, and she feels the power in the muscles of his thighs as she holds his hips on the couch while she does it. He’s strong, but made pliant by her, and she feels power crackling all the way through her body, all the way down to her fingertips. Sparkling and new. It feels like swimming in the waves off Tarth, when they got their biggest, and most dangerous. It feels like doing something absurd, like skydiving. That rush of adrenaline. That spike of fear, of danger. Putting herself at risk, if not of her life, then of humiliation. Embarrassment. Being _seen_.

“Yes, like that,” Jaime says, and he shows her. Teaches her without either of them saying that’s what he’s doing. Once, Brienne took dancing lessons from a man who touched her brusquely, without feeling, putting a mechanical arm around her waist, wrapping unfeeling fingers around her own, but this doesn’t feel _anything_ like that. Jaime’s lessons are breathed out into the skin of her neck, are touches dappled along her inner thigh, are the taste of him and the feel of him and the way he surrounds her with warmth and acceptance, and the way he always tells her that what she wants is normal, that her desire is not shameful, that _she_ is not shameful.

On their fifth meeting, she’s ready, and she tells him so. She makes him pull the curtains again, and she can tell that he hesitates. Maybe he thinks she should be beyond this, now. Maybe he wishes that she was able to overcome this fear of being seen by him when she’s at her most vulnerable. She’ll take his cock in her mouth in the harsh lighting of the suite’s living area. She’ll sit him down in her swivel chair and kiss all down his chest and she will watch the way his face goes slack and tense at once in his pleasure and in the way he searches for it at her too-gentle initial touches. At the fourth meeting, she used her hand on him again, and she found she could not look away from his face. He struggled to keep his eyes open; they kept fluttering closed with pleasure. She liked the ugliness of it. The jerkiness of his movements. The way his voice broke and scraped when he spoke. The redness of his face. All of it was fascinating, and she felt the power of being the cause. But her own pleasure is for behind closed doors, closed curtains, the lights off. She wonders if he _wants_ to see her the way she sees him, and sometimes she almost asks, but she doesn’t. _It’s for me_ , she remembers, every time. _That’s what he’ll say. It’s all for you. He doesn’t need to see me._

She’s more comfortable in the dark. It feels more real there, and yet not real at all. Like a dream forgotten and then remembered in twilight. Hazy, incomplete. Sweet, though. His touch is always gentle in the dark, and his eyes glimmer fiercely in a way she loves to look at.

He’s nearly reverent that first night. Not their first night together, but the night she tells him she’s ready. She’d been so nervous, leading up to it. Her virginity is a construct, and unimportant, and yet a weight that she is ready to be rid of all the same. A woman’s worth is not tied into whether or not she has had sex, or how many times she has had sex, or anything to do with sex at all. She knows this. She has told herself this. But she cannot help the way it seeps into her insecurities and attacks her at the worst times. She can be a hypocrite about these things when it comes to her own life, and so she is partly expecting to suddenly find herself afraid of losing it. Or unable to go through with it.

That doesn’t, happen, though. The nervousness is there, same as it always is, but she feels fine. Excited. Ready. It’s enough to make the nervousness feel unimportant beside it. She helps Jaime undress, and he helps her. He’s still Jaime. A bit more serious tonight, perhaps waiting to see what this means to her, but he still laughs when he bumps his shin in the dark before his eyes adjust. He still makes a performance of everything. Getting out a condom. Jokingly trying to tell her what it is, like she’d have no idea. He’s still himself, and that matters.

When he settles over her, he’s more hesitant than before, and in the blue light she imagines she can see the same nervousness in him that she feels within herself. He touches her face, and she turns into it. Kisses his palm. She hardly understands why, except to reassure him. It seems to work. He brushes his thumb over her lips, and then he bends down, kisses her.

“You’re still sure,” he says, and she nods.

When he touches her, it’s still just as thrilling as it was the first time. When his mouth is on her, she still feels a brightness in her chest, a starburst of emotion. She still feels wild and uncontained in a way that thrills her, because she has never allowed herself to be uncontained before. When he enters her for the first time, it is different. Not unwelcome. Just different. And then he moves, and she adjusts, and it becomes glorious, too, just like the rest of it, and it’s relief as much as it is desire that turns her limbs to jelly afterward, and leaves her lying breathless, spread out on the covers.

After, Jaime is lying half atop her, looking down at her, waiting to see what her reaction will be. She smiles at him, and he smiles back at her. Relieved. She can see it.

“No second thoughts?” he asks, and she shakes her head.

“Would be a bit late for them, wouldn’t it?” she points out, and his grin grows.

“You’d be surprised.”

“It’s unfair of you to say things like that, knowing very well it’ll make me curious.”

“You never ask me, though.”

“Because I’m being polite. But you’re trying to get a rise out of me.”

“You’re right. I am. I had no idea it was working. You’re not as easy to read as you think.”

She laughs at him, and she sits up, still breathing hard, running a hand through her hair, which has gotten hopelessly mussed. Jaime watches her, still smiling, and she resists the urge to cover herself as she moves to the bathroom. It feels like an act of bravery just to cross the room, nude, probably blotchy red and odd-looking in the blue light that makes him look so wonderful. She doesn’t look back at him. She hopes he isn’t watching.

When she gets out of the bathroom, he’s asleep, his face pressed into the pillow, and she doesn’t want to wake him. She feels odd crawling back in beside him, but she thinks it might be insulting if she were to take the couch instead, so she gets into bed as carefully as she can, doing her best not to disturb him. He shifts slightly in his sleep. Rolls over to face her, his eyes still closed. Those lines at the corners of his eyes are smoothed out, and he looks soft and peaceful. Boneless and sated. _I did this_ , she thinks, awed by it. She wants to touch his face, brush his hair back, tuck it behind his ear, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t feel right about it, when he’s asleep. _Should I wake him?_ she wonders. He probably didn’t mean to drift off. But her own exhaustion is coming on her quickly, and she thinks he could probably use the sleep. It’s late.

* * *

When she wakes, Jaime is gone, and she’s relieved. She imagines it would have been awkward, waking up to find him still in her bed. She rolls over, and she feels quite silly, and quite young, but she likes the fact that the sheets on his side of the bed are still warm, and she likes that a whiff of his cologne remains on the pillow he’d used. She feels a bit giddy, actually. Like she imagines she would have if she’d lost her virginity as a girl, when she was young enough to still have that kind of idealism inside her.

She isn’t that girl, and she doesn’t make the mistake of thinking that last night meant anything to Jaime. But it’s nice to pretend, to cling to that feeling. Even if he is a paid professional. Even if she’s a client. It was still _nice_ , and she still appreciates it, and she’s still glad that she did it. Virginity _is_ just a construct. But still, to have it _gone_. To know that she took it into her own hands and did something that she was not certain she’d be able to do. She feels stronger for it. A burden she did not want has been removed, and she chose the way to do it. She chose the man, and the place. She had control, and she feels better for it. She knows she isn’t any different now than she was when she _was_ a virgin. She knows that this changes nothing about her. She is still the same Brienne she has always been. Strong and sturdy and kind. And she’s so glad.

* * *

Later in the week, Chataya messages her.

_Jaime was wondering if you’d still be requiring his services,_ she writes, and Brienne stares down at the text, surprised. The contract they both signed _had_ been rather open-ended on that front: her virginity was the object. But it was more than the virginity. It was the kindness leading up to it. The gentleness, the hand-holding. The companionship. But there was nothing in the contract about after.

_He fulfilled his end of the bargain_ , she writes back. She knows that it’s not a real answer.

Chataya wastes no time: _He says he would be more than happy to keep up the appointments._

Brienne lets it sit. Not for long; an hour of typing and retyping an answer. Putting her phone down and walking away. Picking it up again. Getting coffee.

Then, finally.

_All right_ , she replies.


	5. Chapter 5

It’s odd, after that.

Odd not because it isn’t good, but odd because it starts to feel like she hasn’t hired an escort at all. Of course, she _has_ hired an escort; Jaime never lets her forget it for long. She’s grateful for that. He makes jokes about her deep pockets and how she’s keeping him in comfort and paying him for “lessons”. It’s never judgmental, or snide in a way that makes her feel attacked. He’s so comfortable in his own skin, and open about his profession, and it makes _her_ comfortable, too. She laughs at his jokes, and she joins in his banter when she can, when she isn’t overwhelmed by the way he leaps between conversations. He asks questions about her work, and she tells him as much as she’s comfortable with. Sometimes she remembers what Margaery said, about how his family was once prevalent in politics. She has her guesses, based on a few things, like his looks and the fake name he gave her and the fact that Margaery and Olenna know him, but she’s glad she doesn’t _know._ She can see that background on him, though. He’s bright, and an attentive listener, and he has the same instincts she does. That kind of awareness that comes of growing up in one of the old families. Like something you were raised with, rather than something you learned.

His kindness, and his compassion, and the appearance of giving a shit about her work day, she knows that’s all part of the gig. But answering her questions and helping her through her problems and actually brainstorming with her _isn’t_. It helps her feel more comfortable, but she recognizes it for the danger that it is, and she refuses to read anything into it.

He _likes_ her. She knows that. He likes spending time with her. He tells her so, frequently, whenever she apologizes for talking too much, or for not understanding something, or for being unfocused, consumed by something at work. _I like listening to you talk_ , he says, and maybe it _is_ a lie. Maybe. But she trusts him. Trust implies a lack of knowledge. A lack of certainty. She doesn’t think she’s ever going to know for sure what he thinks of her, but she _trusts_.

Once, when he arrives for an appointment and finds that Brienne was watching a football match before he arrived, he grins at her and sits beside her on the couch, and they order room service and bitch about the game together, and they spend that whole ninety minutes just _watching_ , making each other laugh, before they even make it to the bedroom. His arm across her shoulders. His hand brushing over the skin of her arm. Thrilling little touches, but not with purpose. Casual. It’s almost painful, especially when it’s over, and she remembers.

Sometimes he shows up with little gifts. Trinkets that he saw and thought of her. A blue scarf, once. A book, another time. Sometimes she thinks she should reciprocate, but she doesn’t know what he would like. She asks him, but he deflects, and laughs, and says that she’s paying him enough.

“So are you,” she points out, and he grins wider and kisses her and tells her that she’s sweet, but he doesn’t answer her question, and she doesn’t bring it up again. She knows there are lines, and sometimes she thinks she crosses them by accident. The way he’ll look at her if she asks a question that’s too personal. The way he’ll deflect. She learns him well. She has months of learning him. Appointments sometimes once a week, sometimes more. It doesn’t escape her that she’s seeing him more and hanging out with him more than she was ever fake dating Renly, and it makes her laugh, when she thinks of it. Of course she crosses the lines. How can she not? It’s so easy to stumble over them by accident. Sometimes Jaime offers up parts of himself so easily, and she never understands where the lines _are_.

He tells her that he became an escort because his father was cruel and his siblings never saw him as anything but a means to an end. _A body_ , he says with obvious pleasure, and she laughs at the implication, because she knows that he wants her to. She calls him clever, because she thinks he is, and because she knows it will make him smile, and it does. But other times, she’ll ask a question. Ask him about his sister. About his brother. He mentions them freely, himself. Just little mentions in conversation. But direct questions seem to make him uncomfortable. Like he feels too pinned in. Too under a spotlight. Uncomfortable. She gets better at talking her way out of those boxes when she gets herself into them, but it makes her nervous to ask for more.

Jaime delights in showing her new things. Describing sex acts to her to try and get her to blush. The first time he shows her a video of something he’s trying to describe, she blushes so badly that he has to pause it and laugh at her and kiss her until she’s willing to uncover her face, bring her hands down. She’s able to watch the rest of the video, but he teases her about that every time they meet for the next three weeks, and she blushes every time she remembers. She eventually becomes immune to it, and to his sharper bits. She rolls her eyes when he pulls out his most outlandish ideas, because she likes the way he laughs in delight when she does.

“What do you want?” she asks him once. “You keep describing these things to me, but you don’t ever tell me which ones you want to try. I’d try a few of them, for you.”

His eyes get darker just from the thought of it, and a color rises in his cheeks. Not quite a blush, not like hers, but Brienne notes it with amusement, and it makes her bold.

“So there _is_ something,” she says.

“Of course there’s something. There are a lot of somethings. But I…” He pauses, and considers, and Brienne feels more and more delighted.

“You don’t know what to say,” she realizes. “This is a first.”

“You used to be so polite. I think I’ve ruined you.”

“Yes,” she agrees, and he laughs, and he scrubs his hand through his hair nervously.

“I want you to…or I _don’t_ want you to…there’s no pressure. Or obligation. It’s just something I’d like. But that doesn’t mean…”

“Is this what you feel like all the time, watching me flounder for what to say? Gods, no wonder you’re always so pleased with yourself.”

“Yes,” Jaime admits. His smile at her is fond. “It’s flattering, isn’t it? To make someone so...I don’t know. Flustered?”

“Is that what you are?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever made someone flustered before.”

“You have,” Jaime says. She doesn’t know how to take that, but he’s looking at her intently again, and she cannot speak. “I joked about it once. But it wasn’t quite a joke, like a lot of what I say. I want you to fuck me. I know it’s…it may not be what you want, and you may not be ready. I would be perfectly content without it, you should know.”

“All right,” she says. He blinks at her. His eyes again. They give him away. The pupils blown wide. The open want in them.

“Really?” he asks.

“Yes. It’s not nearly as odd as half of what you’ve described to me. And I…” She thinks of how powerful she feels when she takes him in her mouth. When she takes him in her hand. How powerful will it feel to take him in this way? She’s not sure, but she wants to find out. “I would like it,” she finishes, lamely.

“I worried…” he starts, but then seems to think better of it. He kisses her. Brings her to bed. They fuck. After, she asks him about it. Won’t let him get away with it. They’re lying beside each other, in the blue light, the covers strewn.

“What did you worry about?” she asks. She hates the idea that she has made him worry about anything. She wants him to be comfortable with her in the same way she’s comfortable with him.

“Hm?” he asks, from where he rests against her shoulder.

“You were afraid to ask me if I would fuck you.”

He laughs, a little, and kisses her on the shoulder. Deflecting again, but she keeps watching him, and though he seems to squirm uncomfortably under her gaze, he answers.

“I never want to hurt you,” he says. Sincerely, and for some reason, though she just agreed to fuck him, and though she was just fucked _by_ him, this is the first thing that has made her blush tonight. She has to look at the ceiling to avoid him. Lying back. Pretending at unconcern.

“You don’t,” she says.

“I know how these things work. These…insecurities. I have my own, just as you do, and I know that people can touch them accidentally. Without meaning to.” She thinks of the time she said to him _you think we’re alike_ in a tone that hurt him. Made him think that she was refusing to group them together for a reason other than their disparate looks. As much as he delights in his former profession, she knows that there is an insecurity there. Feeling like an outsider. Feeling like a secret.

“Yes,” she agrees. “I know what you mean.”

“You’re a big woman. You know that. You’re bigger than me. You’re strong, and you’re limber, and you’re a quick study. All things I like about you. I’m not sure if you believe that.”

“I do,” she says. Automatically, because it’s true. He relaxes a bit. Smiles at her.

“I want you to fuck me because I like to be fucked. I’d want you to fuck me no matter your size. I didn’t want you to feel…I don’t know. Used. Objectified.”

She’s surprised to hear it. She looks over at him, and he’s worrying his lower lip between his teeth, and this is one of those dangerous moments where she can forget, a bit, who they both are. It’s easy when she only ever sees him here, in this room that’s not really hers, in this place that exists for the two of them. Easy, and dangerous, especially in the blue light.

“I don’t,” she says. “Do you? Feel used by me?”

He seems as surprised as she is.

“No,” he says. “I don’t. Should I?”

“No. I don’t think…I don’t know when it happened. But I think I believe you. When you say these things. When you say you do want me. Or you enjoy me for the things I’ve always found difficult to like. I didn’t think it was about my size at all.”

“It isn’t,” Jaime assures her. He seems giddy at her words. Proud. Delighted. “Your size is a bonus. It’s nice to be held by you. I don’t know if you realize that. I’m big enough I’m usually the one doing the holding. It’s nice to have the option.” She laughs, because he’s grinning, and he kisses her again. Hungry again. Wanting her again.

Still, as much as she wants him, she thinks her face must be _purple_ when he brings a fucking briefcase to their next meeting and pulls out a strap-on like it’s a business proposition.

Which, well. It _is_.

He likes it, though. He likes when she’s powerful and likes when she’s gentle, and he likes it when she doesn’t know what to do, but he likes it even more when she does. When she gains confidence, when she reaches for him. When she pins him down. She can see the way his eyes flash in answering challenge, and she can feel the yield of his muscles before hers, and the way he submits, and wants, and begs for more. He only ever asks her for things she’s comfortable with, and she’s so grateful. He’s a good teacher, and a good man, and she _likes_ him even as much as she desires him, and there are days when it seems like that could so easily become a problem. When he arrives at her suite one day in a football jersey, carrying a six pack of beer, just to make her laugh. When he pulls her close after he’s fucked her and kisses her sweaty temple. When he looks at her sometimes, whether it’s him inside her or her inside him, and either way there’s something reaching out to her from behind his eyes. Some want he hasn’t expressed. Some need she hasn’t met. It’s dangerous, but it’s fine, because she will be leaving King’s Landing soon, and then it will be over.

* * *

She is sure that she’ll never meet another man like Jaime. Not in any dramatic way. She doesn’t despair about it. But he’s just so perfect. Not perfect by any objective metric, though she’d argue his merits on that, she thinks. But perfect for _her_. So exactly what she’s looking for, and so exactly what she wants.

She also knows that he’s not real. Not really hers, anyway. She thinks that parts of him are real. Their banter and jokes when they’re not touching. There is a real connection between them, she thinks, and he has told her so a dozen times. She has some vague hopes that when she comes back to King’s Landing, they can meet as friends.

He has given her more than she asked for, more than she expected, but she knows he is still keeping some parts locked away. She doesn’t begrudge him that at all, but it helps her when she reminds herself. _What name did he give you_? Margaery had asked. Jaime isn’t Jaime, and he’s very good at what was once his job, and she’s grateful that it was him. For the glimpses of him, _and_ for the parts that aren’t real. Whether he’s pretending or performing or not, it doesn’t matter. He said he wouldn’t, or he wouldn’t as much as he could, but what mattered to her at the beginning doesn’t matter anymore. She’s so glad she met him. She’s not sure anyone else would have been able to draw her out of her shell when she was at her least confident. She’s grateful to Margaery, and to Chataya, and to him. She just also wishes he was real, sometimes.

So she doesn’t expect to meet another man like him. Tailor-made to be what she wants. That seems impossible. But she knows she’ll be more open to men in the future, and she has to thank him for that somehow. She just doesn’t know how.

It’s bothering her, on the final week that she’s scheduled to be in King’s Landing. She has appointments lined up for two more nights after this one, and she knows she should be enjoying the time she has left instead of overthinking it, trying to make sure she makes that last appointment count, but she can’t help it. Jaime’s dressing to leave, probably thinking her asleep, and she says his name, quietly, calling him back. He crawls to her on the bed, over the covers, grinning down at her.

“Something else?” he asks. She doesn’t think he’s faking the eagerness, but if he is, he fakes it well.

“You must want something for yourself,” she says. He frowns down at her, rolls to his side, resting his head on the pillow beside hers. Perhaps he can sense that she’s distressed.

“What do you mean?” he asks.

“A gift. Or something. I don’t know. You’ve been so good to me.”

He looks at her softly. Touches her softly, too. Her broken nose. Her jaw. Her lips.

“And you’ve been good to me,” he reminds her. The money, yes. She knows it’s a lot. But it doesn’t feel like it, compared to the confidence he has helped her find within herself.

“I wish there was more I could do,” she says. “Anything you want. Honestly. I’m a queen, remember.” Trying to joke. Trying to make it sound like she hasn’t been thinking about him constantly, now. Desperate to make him understand how much she appreciates him. How much she cares, without crossing any of the lines that make him uncomfortable.

Jaime hesitates. Again he looks at her with that searching, halfway wary look. She thinks he’ll tell her what he wants. Some desire that has not yet been met. Even if it’s more money. Or an introduction to someone in her circle. _Anything._

But he’s Jaime. So he smiles.

“A kingdom of my own,” he answers, and Brienne laughs.

“All right,” she says.

“You said anything.”

“Yes. Well. Anything in my power to give.”

His gaze softens, and he touches her face again with that gentle care she craves. She wants to lean forward and kiss him, but she thinks he would probably get the wrong idea. Believe that she was expecting something more from him tonight. She’s tired, and he’s already been here longer than usual, so she doesn’t. She has taken enough of his time.

“You owe me nothing,” he says.

“It isn’t about owing.”

“I know it’s not.”

“It’s about giving.”

“You’re very eager to give yourself to everyone,” Jaime says. “You realize that, don’t you? Your people. Margaery. Your friends. Now me. I think I’m the first thing you’ve ever wanted for yourself and gone after.”

“Maybe,” she admits. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“That’s what you can give me. A promise that you’ll go after what you want. No matter what it is.”

The shadows in the room are intense, the blue light brighter than ever, because he left the curtains open a crack more than usual. She didn’t notice it, earlier, but he’s so visible, tonight. She must be brighter, too. She touches his face, because he doesn’t move away, and he sinks into it, like he wants it, and then he kisses her. She wants to touch him, his stomach, his cock, his back, his arms, so she does, roaming him with her hands. He hums happily against her mouth and then kisses a line down her throat, to her chest.

It doesn’t go anywhere else, because she yawns, then, and they both laugh, both too tired to do much more than kiss and touch each other idly. She likes it like this. This softness between them.

“Stay,” she says. She surprises him. He pulls back to look at her. “If you want,” she adds quickly.

“What do _you_ want?” he asks.

“For you to stay.”

Her answer is honest, apologetic, and Jaime nods.

“I’ll stay,” he says, almost like he wants it too.

* * *

In the morning, he’s still there, and he’s awake when Brienne’s eyes open. He’s sitting on the edge of the bed, with his back to her. Stretching. She watches the way his muscles play under his skin. The sunlight is bright, through the too-wide crack in the curtains, and it blurs him somehow. Makes him indistinct. Or makes him _too_ distinct, maybe. She sits up, and Jaime turns and looks at her, and he smiles, and her heart feels…unsteady. She smiles back, and she excuses herself, and she hurries into the bathroom to brush her teeth. Make herself presentable. There are pillow lines on her face, and she looks bleary, too tired. It doesn’t matter. She knows it doesn’t matter. Still.

When she gets back out into the bedroom, he’s reclined against the pillows, and Brienne wants to go to him. She means to go to the curtains, first, but Jaime reaches out and grabs her wrist as she passes the bed.

“Don’t,” he says. “I want to look at you.”

She hesitates, but he’s looking at her so earnestly, and so she nods. He stays on his back, spread out on the pillows like a king. She feels more exposed like this, on top like this, but it isn’t the first time she’s done it with him, and so she wastes little time. She does not think about the light. She tosses him a condom from his discarded pants pocket. She tries to be airy. Unconcerned. She can’t think about the light. She climbs onto him. Sinks down onto him. His hands go to her hips, and he looks up at her. Watches her as she moves. The self-consciousness doesn’t last for very long. It can’t, when she feels so powerful, and so good, and so _glad_. He makes the same needy little noises he made the first time, and it always makes her feel…she doesn’t know. She doesn’t have the words for it. But she loves them. She wonders if other men make noises as openly and wantonly as Jaime does, or if it’s a part of his job. Making the people he fucks think that he’s desperate for them.

He grips her hips tightly when he comes, and she feels bruised in a way that she likes. She rolls off him, onto her back, and he pulls her closer and kisses up and down her neck, and then he’s disappearing beneath the covers and making her come again on his tongue, and it’s all so _good_. So solid and real and good, and she knows she won’t find a man like him anywhere else.

After, she holds him. They hold each other. She almost dozes off again, but she knows she needs to get up, and he should be on his way. She wonders, vaguely, how much this whim is going to cost her, but she decides she doesn’t care. It was nice, to wake up and to feel desired. Nice to be fucked in the daylight, even though she was sure she didn’t want that. Jaime seems proud of her, too, and that still thrills her.

She eventually does get up, and they help each other dress, tossing clothes at each other where they’ve gotten mixed up. After, they eat breakfast at the little table in her suite, and Jaime chats with her over a bowl of cereal, his eyes crinkling up at the corners every time he smiles at her. Her heart hurts, and she hides it. Pushes it down within herself. She cannot possibly be so greedy as to want more.

When he’s finished, he stands up, and he seems uncertain.

“Thank you,” she tells him. “For staying.”

“It was my pleasure,” he says.

“I know it wasn’t…”

“What?”

“In the contract. But…it was nice. To wake up beside someone. Thank you.”

He looks at her for a heartbeat too long, and those crinkles at the corners of his eyes fade. He nods. Swallows. Nods again.

“You’re welcome,” he says. His voice is slightly hoarse. Slightly wrong. “You have been…it’s been my pleasure. Really.”

He’s earnest, and she smiles at him, thanking him again. He doesn’t smile back.

* * *

“I’m so sorry, Brienne,” Chataya says, over the phone. “Jaime won’t be able to make the final two appointments. Something came up.”

Brienne finds that she isn’t terribly surprised to hear it. Jaime had been odd at their last parting, and she has worried since. Trying to figure out what she said. How she seemed. He’d looked at her so strangely. He hadn’t been smiling. He was _always_ smiling. She had been sure that she was so careful at hiding her feelings from him, but maybe not.

Chataya’s call actually makes her feel better. She’d asked for too much, probably. Gotten too close. He’d looked at her and must have seen too well, that last morning. Something he wasn’t comfortable with.

“I’m really sorry,” she says, and Chataya clicks her tongue.

“You’ve done nothing wrong. Jaime wanted me to stress that.”

“I must have. I asked him to stay, and he…”

“Stayed. Happily, Brienne. Trust me. Jaime’s very sorry he can’t make it.”

Brienne knows better than to argue with Chataya, but she also knows better than to believe her, and so she changes the subject. Chataya asks if she wants to hire a different man for the next two appointments, but Brienne refuses the offer.

“I trust you,” she says. “And I know you would pick someone wonderful. But they wouldn’t be Jaime.”

“If you’re sure,” Chataya says, and Brienne says that she is.

* * *

It isn’t that she’s not disappointed. Of course she’s disappointed. She had been looking forward to the last two appointments with Jaime. And she had wanted to think of something to get him. Some gift. Some thank you. The money wasn’t enough to express it, and she’s never been very good at words. But he just never let enough of himself show. She didn’t know what he liked outside of what he wanted with his body. Didn’t know what he would want from a client beyond the payment they’d already agreed on. But it’s probably for the best that she didn’t get the chance. If he was so uncomfortable with her display of feelings, a gift would have only made it worse.

She just wishes that he’d allowed her to explain. Explain that she cares for him, and that she _has_ developed feelings for him, but that she isn’t the same little girl who fell in love with Renly and ignored all evidence that he would never be _for_ her. She’s able to separate her feelings and reality now. She’s not surprised that she felt so strongly for Jaime, and she wasn’t unprepared for it. She trusted him enough to let him close to her. To sleep with her, in both senses of the word. She’s never trusted another person like that, and of _course_ something happened in her heart because of it. That doesn’t mean she can’t be realistic.

She hates to think of what Jaime must think of her now. Pathetic, pining. Vain enough to think that a man who fucks for a living would fall for her just because of sex, which she probably isn’t even very good at. She can’t do anything about how he sees her, though. The best proof she can offer is to move on with her life, and to be exactly who she has always been.

* * *

Her final week in King’s Landing is spent as competently as ever. She doesn’t regret the two cancelled appointments as much as she feared she would, though her suite feels empty, and lonely, both evenings she was supposed to spend with him. Margaery watches her carefully, and asks leading questions about her plans every night, but Brienne doesn’t let anything show. By the time she’s at the airport to head home, Margaery has run out of patience.

“And Jaime?” she asks.

“What about him?”

“Are you going to keep seeing him?”

“What, fly back from Tarth every week just to shag him?”

“I’ve heard of stranger things, and it seems like it might be worth it. I’ve never seen you so happy.”

“That’s not because of him,” Brienne points out. “That’s because of me.”

Margaery hugs her.

“Keep your options open,” she advises. “He’s a good man.”

“I know he is.”

“And you know how seldom I say that about men.”

“I do.”

* * *

Back at home, on Tarth, Brienne attends functions. She throws galas. She raises money for her favorite causes. She gives tours to school children who come to see the castle. She writes articles, and works on the memoirs that Margaery has been trying to get her to finish for years. She oversees the improvements, the constant renovations to restore Evenfall Hall to its previous glory. She hikes in the hills, and she visits the villages. Her thoughts go from time to time to Jaime, and to the time they shared, but she is not consumed by her feelings. They are a rational, quietly nurtured thing. She knows it’s unlikely she will ever see him again, and she almost _likes_ the ache of that sadness. Wishing she could and knowing she can’t. Missing him and remembering him fondly.

She has been back on Tarth for a month when Margaery calls.

“It’s probably nothing,” she says. “But the transfers didn’t go through, for some reason. Or they did, but they came back.”

“The transfers?”

“The payments for your _massage therapy_. All of them but the first two.”

Brienne says she’ll handle it, feeling sick. Guilty. She’s not sure why Chataya hasn’t called her about it yet, but it doesn’t feel right. The payments _should_ have cleared. She put aside the right amount of money into that account, cloaked and hidden so as to not have anything to do with her identity. It doesn’t make her or Tarth look very good, to not be able to pay those bills.

“I’m so sorry,” she tells Chataya. “I don’t know what’s happened. But I’m going to send you the money directly, and you can…”

“There was no mistake,” Chataya says. “The money was returned.”

“What? By the bank?”

“By Jaime.”

“What? _Why_?”

“He told me that he didn’t want it.”

“I don’t…why not?”

“He didn’t say.” Chataya sounds amused, and Brienne feels…stung. She knows that Chataya isn’t making fun of her. She trusts Chataya. She trusts Jaime too. But still, her first impulse is to think that Jaime must have seen it in her. That growing regard. The fact that she cared about him. The fact that she knew she was going to miss him. _He feels sorry for me. They both do._

“Give him the money anyway,” she says. 

“Brienne, I appreciate your desire to pay your debts, but Jaime doesn’t want the money, and believe me, he doesn’t need it.”

“It’s about the principle,” Brienne says. “If he doesn’t want my money, tell him to donate it to a charity of his choice, but I used his services, and that means that I’ll pay for his services.”

Chataya hums disapprovingly, but Brienne secures an agreement before she hangs up the phone, and then she watches with grim satisfaction as the money leaves her account again. It feels like a door being closed. A finality. Her debts paid. Her conscience clear.

* * *

Except. Well. Here he is.

On Tarth.

In her castle.

It was Margaery who came up with the idea that Brienne should plan to just _happen_ across tours sometimes. Like she’s just a busy woman, going about her day, and then she happens to come down the stairs in time to greet some tourists who are visiting the parts of the castle that are open to the public. It’s good press, Margaery said, and Brienne sees the sense in it. There’s always much squealing and cries of excitement, and she takes many selfies with little girls who look up to her. It’s good for the public to see her like this, casual and in her own home, and it’s just as good for Brienne to remember that her people _like_ her. They think she’s a good queen. Even people who come from far away to visit, they bring little girls who think she’s wonderful, and wish to be like her, and it’s something that cheers Brienne, every time.

Jaime is the first person she sees when she walks down the stairs and surprises the tour group. He’s watching her, and there is something hollow in his expression. Tense. He smiles, though, as the excitement rings in the air between them. Brienne tears her eyes away, and she greets the group of girls who are clamoring to meet her. One of them, a pretty blonde child, turns to him.

“Uncle Jaime, _please_ take a picture!” she cries, and so he does. His smile to Brienne is polite, when he thanks her for her time. Calls her _your grace_ with everyone else. Brienne doesn’t know how to act. Doesn’t know what he wants. He looks at her piercingly, as if trying to tell her something, or ask something of her, but she can’t understand it. She never could, when he looked at her that way. When the tour group moves on, she remains standing in that hall, and she puts her back to the wall and breathes, allowing the unexpected shock to fade. What poor luck, she thinks, to see him here. And with a niece, too.

_Uncle Jaime_ , she remembers. She barely has time to register that. _Jaime. His name_ is _Jaime._

“Brienne.”

She turns, and Jaime is back. Just slightly out of breath, darting a look behind him to make sure that his absence wasn’t noted by the rest of the tour group. He runs a hand through his hair. He looks nervous. She takes in those details, and she sees him in her home, and she remembers suddenly that she has never seen him outside her hotel suite in King’s Landing. An unreal place for an unreal man, but he’s here. _Here_ , and real, and his name has always been Jaime.

“Jaime,” she says.

“Why did you return the money?” he asks. Intense, like it’s important. Like her answer is important.

“Why did _you_?” she fires back, bristling. He hesitates, almost speaks several times. She thinks he’s going to deflect again, but then…

“Because it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t work.”

She doesn’t know what to say to that. Doesn’t quite understand it, really.

“What?” she asks. “The. The first two. Chataya said that…”

“It stopped being work for me when you kissed me the first time,” he says, like it hurts him to say it. It hurts her to hear it, maybe, she thinks.

“I thought,” she says. He waits, while she gathers her words. Patient as always. She doesn’t disbelieve him, really. She just doesn’t understand. She isn’t afraid, either, to admit, “I thought you saw that I was…what I felt for you.”

“No,” Jaime says, pained. “I didn’t see it at all.”

“Oh.”

“You mentioned the contract, and I thought I was…I’ve never, in all my years working, done something as foolish as falling for a client. But I fell for you.”

He speaks so plainly, even though he is so clearly fearful, uncertain of her reaction. Can he really not know? Can he really not see? She thought she was so obvious.

“Fell for me,” she says. “Are you just being dramatic?”

“No,” he answers. A grin is stealing over his face, now. Some of the color coming back into his pale, bloodless cheeks. Whatever he couldn’t see in her before, he must see it now.

“You have to admit, it’s a concern.”

“I’m often dramatic,” he agrees.

“You are. But I can see no reason for you to exaggerate about this. You _did_ ask me for a kingdom.”

“I did,” he laughs. “But I’m not asking you for one now.”

“What _are_ you asking of me?”

“Nothing so much. Your heart.”

“And that’s not dramatic?”

“Painfully earnest was the vibe I was hoping for.”

“Well, you succeeded.”

“You’re blushing. I imagine that’s a yes, then.”

“You didn’t already know you had it? I thought it was so obvious. I thought…”

“It wasn’t. You’re very good at hiding yourself.”

She has been proud of that before. She supposes she never thought it could hurt someone, to have no idea how she was feeling.

“Your name. It’s really Jaime?”

“Yes. My fool tongue knew before I did. You made me feel so…seen. Comfortable. I liked you then, already. It slipped out. I’d meant to give you a fake one.”

_Seen._ The same thing she resisted for so long with him. The same thing she could not avoid. It makes her smile, for some reason, to think of both of them trying to dodge each other’s sight, and failing all the while.

“It will be a scandal,” she says, and he looks alarmed.

“I’m not asking you to…no, gods. I just want. It can remain. Hidden.” But his words are choppy, and his eyes not fully there. And she knows: it’s what he expects. It’s what he thinks he’s worth. Secrecy. Love, but only where no one can see it. For her, he would do it.

“No,” she says. “Not forever. I wouldn’t want it to be hidden.”

He looks at her for a long while. She tries to understand what’s behind his eyes, but it occurs to her now that maybe she’s never been very good at it, if she’s missed all these clues. But she can imagine it. The way he held her. The way he wanted to see her in the light. He’s not someone who would be happy remaining hidden forever, though he would, if she asked him to.

“It _would_ be a scandal,” he warns. He’s almost angry.

“I know.”

“The headlines alone.”

“Yes.”

“Chataya has been good at keeping everything secret. The nature of my former profession. But it’s too…it’s too salacious, Brienne. Someone’s going to talk, and then it’s going to be everywhere. They’ll think I’ve tricked you. They’ll think…it’ll be Renly again. Maybe worse.”

“I know that, too.”

He’s frustrated, disbelieving.

“You can’t be serious,” he says. “It isn’t worth all that. It isn’t…”

“You are,” she interrupts. Jaime’s words falter. His breath trembles out of him, a harsh exhale as he looks up at her. He had been pacing; he stops. His eyes are bright, gleaming, almost fevered. “You _are_ worth it,” she says, and she does not look away from him until she sees that he believes her. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who has been reading and commenting! I am already pretty deep into a first draft of a Jaime POV sequel, so you have that to look forward to, if you enjoyed this <3


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